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Oct 12, 2021 2 mins, 12 secs

Workers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have lifted the Orion Stage Adapter on top of the Space Launch System moon rocket, adding the structure housing 10 CubeSat rideshare payloads heading into deep space on the Artemis 1 mission.

Teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy raised the Orion Stage Adapter on top of the Space Launch System rocket Friday evening, according to Madison Tuttle, a NASA spokesperson.

The Orion spacecraft, NASA’s human-rated moon ship, will be added to the rocket in the coming days to complete the build-up of the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) launch vehicle for an unpiloted test flight to lunar orbit and back to Earth.

NASA has not announced a target launch date for the mission, known as Artemis 1, but it is expected to fly some time in early 2022.

Last month, engineers finished testing of the Space Launch System with a mock-up of the Orion spacecraft.

With the modal test complete, ground crews with NASA and its contractor Jacobs removed mass simulators for the Orion spacecraft and the Orion Stage Adapter, setting the stage for stacking of flight hardware.

The Orion Stage Adapter carries deployer mechanisms for the Artemis 1 mission’s 10 rideshare payloads.

Engineers affixed CubeSat deployers inside the Orion Stage Adapter for the rideshare payloads, which will release from the rocket after the SLS upper stage releases the Orion spacecraft on the way to the moon.

“Despite the tremendous efforts of the students and the team, the Cislunar Explorers mission was not able to deliver our spacecraft in time for Artemis 1,” wrote Curran Muhlberger, the faculty advisor for the mission.

The third mission that was not ready in time for Artemis 1’s launch is CU-E3 from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

That CubeSat was intended to launch on Artemis 1 and head into deep space, reaching a distance more than 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) from Earth to test a miniature planar antenna for deep space communications.

The 10 rideshare missions delivered to Kennedy Space Center in time for Artemis 1 include BioSentinel, a project led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California to investigate the affects of deep space radiation on living organisms.

BioSentinel was the last of the 10 CubeSats to be installed into the Orion Stage Adapter before its transfer to the VAB for stacking on the Space Launch System.

BioSentinel was mounted on its deployer inside the Orion Stage Adapter last month, while the other nine CubeSats on the Artemis 1 mission were installed in July.

The mission will also demonstrate CubeSat technologies in deep space.

• ArgoMoon: This mission will use a small satellite to perform proximity maneuvers around the SLS upper stage after deployment from the Orion Stage Adapter

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