AA / Houston
The American space agency, NASA, has postponed the launch of the Artemis 1 mission to the moon, which should take place on Friday, to Saturday because of bad weather, and it is already planning a further postponement for the day of next Monday.
“For the day Saturday, the weather will be a little different from what we saw yesterday,” US Space Force meteorologist Mark Berger said at a Tuesday evening press conference.
The new launch date has been set for Saturday at 2:17 p.m. local time (6:17 p.m. GMT) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States.
“Saturday’s weather forecast calls for showers and thunderstorms in the morning, with a possible improvement in the weather in the followingnoon,” said Berger.
The meteorological officer expressed his “optimism that the weather should be good and suitable for the launch on Saturday followingnoon”.
NASA has postponed the launch of the Artemis 1 space probe for a few days, in the day of last Monday, due to a problem of refueling which affected one of its four new thrusters.
This mission will be done without astronauts, and aims to prepare a manned flight and collect scientific data, according to the same source.
“If we find that the weather on Saturday is not favorable for the launch of the rocket, it can still be postponed for a few days until the day of next Monday,” NASA said.
The Artemis 1 mission is the first of three spaceflights, part of the US Space Agency’s premier space exploration project.
The Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 missions aim to take humans to the Moon and perform missions on Mars.
The trip to the moon is the first of its kind in 50 years when NASA’s Apollo mission, which landed humans on the surface of Earth’s satellite, before returning them safely to earth.
* Translated from Arabic by Mounir Bennour.
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