Specialists of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) intend to conduct new fire tests of the engines of the Space Launch System (SLS) launch vehicle at the end of February, while the previous ones completed ahead of schedule, the space agency said in a statement published on its website.
Report informs referring to TASS that the test of the four engines, installed on a special support at the NASA test facility in Mississippi, will be held 'in the fourth week of February.'
Previous engine tests took place on January 16. They worked simultaneously for about a minute, although it was expected that this would last about eight minutes. SLS project manager John Honeycat explained that an automatic system had worked to shut off the engines. The settings of the corresponding software were reportedly behind the failure, and they will be changed.
Experts have studied all the data obtained during the previous test. The space agency employees found that the engines did not sustain significant damage. NASA expects the upcoming tests to last eight minutes.