With the Artemis 1 launch site in the predicted path of Hurricane Ian, NASA has decided not to take any chances with the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. The agency will roll them back to the safety of the Vehicle Assembly Building, starting at around 11PM ET this evening. You'll be able to watch the rollback on NASA's ongoing Artemis 1 livestream below.

"Managers met Monday morning and made the decision based on the latest weather predictions associated with Hurricane Ian, after additional data gathered overnight did not show improving expected conditions for the Kennedy Space Center area,” NASA said in a statement. “The decision allows time for employees to address the needs of their families and protect the integrated rocket and spacecraft system.”

Although an SLS fueling test that took place last week was successful, NASA was forced to scrub a planned September 27th launch due to the threat of the hurricane. If the agency is unable to launch Artemis 1 before October 3rd, it won't be able to make another attempt until the next window opens on October 17th.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is about to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos, and you'll have plenty of options to follow along as it happens. The space agency is livestreaming coverage of the DART collision starting at 6PM Eastern, and you can tune into either a full presentation or a dedicated stream from the craft's DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation) instrument. That last feed will show one image per second up to the moment of impact. The vehicle is expected to smash into Dimorphos at about 7:14PM, although its distance from Earth will delay the footage you see.

You aren't tied to official sources, either. The Virtual Telescope Project will host its own stream starting at 6:30PM ET. It's teaming up with two South African observatories to provide an Earth-bound view of the collision. The Didymos asteroid system (where Dimorphos is a moonlet) will just be a dot, but you should see it flare up after DART makes contact.

DART will gauge the viability of using spacecraft to deflect asteroids, comets and other objects that might otherwise strike Earth. If all goes well, it will show that NASA can use autonomous vehicles as defensive systems and confirm the results using ground telescopes. Dimorphos is an ideal candidate due to both its relative proximity and the lack of threats — NASA won't inadvertently create the very calamity it's trying to avoid.

This won't be the only mission headed to the Didymos system, either. The European Space Agency expects its Hera mission to reach Didymos by 2026, when it will study DART's effects on Dimorphos. If there are any questions left after tonight's one-way flight, they should be answered within a few years.

NASA can’t seem to catch a break. After completing a successful fueling test of the Space Launch System on Wednesday, the agency had hoped to move forward with Artemis 1 on September 27th. Unfortunately, that date is no longer on the table due to Tropical Storm Ian.

The storm formed Friday night over the central Caribbean. According to The Washington Post, meteorologists expect Ian to become a hurricane by Sunday before hitting Cuba and then making its way to the Florida Gulf Coast. As of Saturday, it’s unclear where Ian will make landfall once it arrives on the mainland. There’s also uncertainty about just how strong of a storm the state should expect, but the current above-average warmth of ocean waters in the eastern Gulf Coast is not a good sign.

In anticipation of Ian becoming a hurricane, NASA has decided to prepare the SLS for a rollback to the safety of the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building. The agency will make a final decision on Sunday. If the forecast worsens, the rollback will begin on Sunday night or early Monday morning. The plan gives NASA the flexibility to move forward with another launch attempt if there’s a change in the weather situation.

If Artemis 1 can’t fly before October 3rd, the next earliest launch window opens on October 17th. A rollback to the VAB would mean NASA could also test the batteries of the rocket’s flight termination system. That would give NASA more flexibility around the October 17th to October 31st launch window.

The next Artemis 1 launch attempt might take place as soon as next week, seeing as NASA has met all the objectives it set out to do to consider its rocket's fuel test a success. NASA had to test adding super-cooled fuel to the Space Launch System's tanks to confirm the repairs it made after it scrubbed the mission's second launch attempt in late August. The ground team at Kennedy Space Center spotted a persistent hydrogen leak affecting one of the fuel lines on the SLS at the time and tried to fix it the day of three times. In the end, the team was unsuccessful and decided to postpone the mission.

The team determined a few days later that the leak was triggered when the SLS rocket's core booster tank went through a brief overpressurization. To prevent the same incident from happening, the team adjusted procedures for filling the rocket's tank with propellants, and it involves transitioning temperatures and pressures more slowly to prevent rapid changes that could cause leakage. The team's engineers also replaced the rocket's liquid hydrogen seals after discovering a small indentation in one of them that may have contributed to the leak. 

While the engineers encountered another hydrogen leak during the fuel test, their troubleshooting efforts worked this time around and got the leak to "within allowable rates." That allowed them to conduct the pre-pressurization test, which brought up the liquid hydrogen tank's pressure level to match what it would experience just before an actual launch. 

Artemis 1 launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said the test went "really well" and that the team was able to accomplish all the objectives it set out to do. NASA will now evaluate data from the test before deciding if it can schedule another launch for the mission on its target date of September 27th.

The James Webb Space Telescope is still snapping its first pictures of Solar System planets, and the latest batch could be particularly useful. NASA and the ESA have shared early images of Mars, taken on September 5th, that promise new insights into the planet's atmosphere. Data from the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) is already offering a few surprises. For starters, the giant Hellas Basin is oddly darker than nearby areas at the hottest time of the day, NASA's Giuliano Liuzzi and Space.comnoted — higher air pressure at the basin's lower altitude has suppressed thermal emissions.

The JWST imagery also gave space agencies an opportunity to share Mars' near-infrared atmospheric composition using the telescope's onboard spectrograph array. The spectroscopic 'map' (pictured at middle) shows the planet absorbing carbon dioxide at several different wavelengths, and also shows the presences of carbon monoxide and water. A future research paper will provide more detail about the Martian air's chemistry.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Mars JWST/GTO team

It was particularly tricky to record the images. Mars is one of the brightest objects the James Webb telescope can see — a problem for an observatory designed to study the most distant objects in the universe. Researchers countered this by capturing very short exposures and using special techniques to analyze the findings.

This is only the initial wave of pictures and data. It will take more observations to reveal more about Mars. However, the spectral info already hints at more information about the planet's materials. Liuzzi also thinks JWST studies could settle disputes over the presence of methane on Mars, potentially signalling that the Red Planet harbored life in its distant past.

Blue Origin’s recent NS-23 flight didn’t go according to plan. On Monday morning, the private space firm was forced to abort the uncrewed mission after one of its New Shepard rockets suffered an unspecified “booster failure.” The problem came up about a minute after the flight took off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site at 10:26AM ET. You can see the entire incident unfold in the video the company shared on Twitter.

“It appears we have experienced an anomaly with today’s flight,” a commentator said during the NS-23 livestream. “This was unplanned and we don't have any details yet. But our crew capsule was able to escape successfully, we’ll follow its progress through landing. As you can see, the drogues have deployed, and the mains are going to be pulled out next.”

The capsule was carrying NASA-funded research equipment. “It’s useless to speculate about what happened at this point. Not even the company knows the cause,” tweeted Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, adding in a separate post that had the spacecraft been manned, the crew “would have felt a serious jolt, but would have been safe.”

Blue Shepard won’t be able to fly again until Blue Origin investigates the incident and the Federal Aviation Administration signs off on the company’s findings. 

NASA has completed a critical repair of its next-generation Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. On Friday, engineers replaced the leaky seal that forced the agency to scrub its most recent attempt to launch Artemis 1. On September 3rd, a fitting on one of the fuel lines to the SLS began leaking hydrogen. Ground crew at Kennedy Space Center tried to troubleshoot the problem three times, only for the leak to persist and force NASA to call off the launch attempt. On Friday, engineers also replaced the seal on a 4-inch hydrogen “bleed line” that was responsible for a smaller leak during an earlier August 29th launch attempt.

With the new gaskets in place, NASA plans to conduct a fueling test to verify they’re working as intended. The dry run will see engineers attempt to load the SLS with all 736,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen it would need during a regular flight. NASA hopes to successfully complete that test as early as September 17th. “This demonstration will allow engineers to check the new seals under cryogenic, or supercold, conditions as expected on launch day and before proceeding to the next launch attempt,” the agency said.

On Thursday, NASA announced it was targeting September 23rd for another go at putting Artemis 1 into space, with September 27th as a backup. Whether it can make those dates will depend on next week’s fueling test and a decision from the US Space Force. Flight regulations require that NASA test the battery of Artemis 1’s flight termination system every 20 days. That’s something it can only do within the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building. The Space Force previously granted the agency an extension on the 20-day deadline. NASA has now asked for another waiver.

The Tarantula Nebula has been photographed by several observatories in the past, but new images captured by the James Webb Telescope give us a clearer, sharper view of the star-forming region. Also known as 30 Doradus, the Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region among the galaxies near our own, making it a favorite subject for scientists studying star formation. 

Astronomers used three of Webb's infrared instruments to image the Tarantula Nebula. When viewed using Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), you'll see the silky filaments that earned the nebula its name surrounding a cluster of massive young stars sparkling blue in the center of the image above. According to NASA, tens of thousands of these young stars have never been seen before as they were concealed by cosmic dust. Stellar winds and radiation from these young stars had hollowed out the center of the nebula, which is bound to keep shifting and changing shape. The filaments that surround them are hiding even more protostars, after all, and they'll emerge to join the other stars at the center as they blow away the gas and dust obscuring them from our view. 

In fact, Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph has observed one such star that has started emerging from behind its dusty veil. NASA says the star's activity wouldn't have been revealed without Webb's high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths. The astronomers also used Webb's Mid-infrared Instrument (MIRI) to view the nebula in longer infrared wavelengths and captured an image quite different from the one captured by NIRCam. This time, the young stars at the center of the nebula fade in the background, while the cooler gas and dust surrounding them glow and take the spotlight, as you can see below.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

As NASA explains, the Tarantula Nebula is of special interest to scientists studying star formation, because it has a chemical composition similar to the star forming regions during the universe's "cosmic noon." That's the period in time when the universe was only a couple of billion years old and when star formation was at its peak. In our own galaxy, there are no regions producing new stars at a similarly furious pace. Also, star forming regions in the Milky Way have a different composition. By focusing the Webb Telescope on the Tarantula Nebula, scientists now have images to compare against deep observations of much distant galaxies from the actual cosmic noon, which could help them better understand the early years of the universe.

NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System likely won’t fly in September. After a fuel leak forced the agency to scrub its second attempt to launch Artemis 1, there had been some hope the mission could get underway before its current launch window ended on September 6th. That won’t be the case.

"We will not be launching in this launch period," Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development, told a room full of journalists after the events of Saturday morning. “This was not a manageable leak,” Artemis Mission Manager Michael Sarafin added, referring to the “quick disconnect” fitting that gave NASA so much trouble yesterday. Ground crew at Kennedy Space Center attempted to troubleshoot the issue three times before recommending a “no go” for Saturday’s launch.

According to Sarafin, the leak began after one of the fuel lines to Artemis 1’s core booster went through a brief and “inadvertent” overpressurization. An “errant” manual command from Mission Control triggered the incident. As of Saturday, Sarafin said it was too early to know if that was the cause of the fuel leak, but there was enough flammable hydrogen gas near the rocket that it would not have been safe to launch. "We want to be deliberate and careful about drawing conclusions here, because correlation does not equal causation," he added.

Whatever caused the leak, NASA now needs to replace the non-metallic gasket that was supposed to prevent hydrogen from escaping at the quick disconnect. The agency has two options as to how to proceed. It could either replace the gasket at Launch Pad 39B or the KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Doing the work on the pad would allow NASA to test the system at cryogenic temperatures. That would give the agency a better idea of how the rocket will behave once it’s ready to launch again. However, NASA would need to build an enclosure around the SLS. At the VAB, meanwhile, the building would act as the enclosure but would limit testing to ambient temperatures only.

In the end, the SLS will likely end up at the VAB no matter what since NASA needs to test the batteries in the vehicle’s flight termination system every 20 days. The system allows the Space Force to destroy the rocket if it flies off course or something else goes awry during flight. NASA can only conduct that testing in the VAB, and the Space Force recently gave the agency a five-day extension on the usual deadline.

All told, Artemis 1’s next earliest launch window opens on September 16th and then closes on October 4th. That opening includes a potential conflict with another mission. Space X’s Crew-5 flight is scheduled to lift off on October 3rd from Kennedy Space Center. Therefore, NASA is more likely to aim for the subsequent window that opens on October 17th and runs until the end of the month. We’ll know more next week when NASA holds another press conference, but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was adamant the agency wouldn’t attempt to launch Artemis 1 until it feels the SLS is ready to fly. “We do not launch until we think it’s right,” he said. "I look at this as part of our space program, of which safety is at the top of our list.”

Following a failed attempt earlier this week, NASA has once again delayed the start of its Artemis 1 Moon mission. The agency was forced to scrub Saturday’s launch after staff at Kennedy Space Center failed to fix a persistent leak in a liquid hydrogen connection point on the agency's next-generation Space Launch System super heavy-lift rocket. NASA detected the leak at 7:23AM ET and tried to troubleshoot the problem in a few different ways, but after three failed attempts ground crew recommended a "no go" for Saturday's launch attempt.  

"The Artemis I mission to the Moon has been postponed. Teams attempted to fix an issue related to a leak in the hardware transferring fuel into the rocket, but were unsuccessful," NASA said on Twitter. 

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