Image of the Day: NASA Conducts a Post-Labor Day Communications Test for Artemis 1...

Late last night, I visited NASA's DSN Now website to see which interplanetary missions were currently in contact with the three Deep Space Network stations in Spain, California and Australia as Labor Day was ending here in the United States.

To my surprise, I saw that two radio antennas at the DSN station in Madrid were apparently communicating with flight hardware for the Artemis 1 mission!

The call sign for this test was EM1...as in Exploration Mission 1, the original name for the Space Launch System's (SLS) maiden voyage.

Not sure if this communications test was with the SLS core stage booster [which recently underwent an integrated modal test inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida] or the Orion capsule (which is about to be fully encapsulated by the four ogive panels of its launch abort system at KSC), but this seems to show that the unmanned lunar flight is moving a step closer to flight.

(The more-likely explanation is that Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston was running this communications test.)

In regards to SLS and Orion, they should finally be mated later this month or early October.

The launch of Artemis 1 is now scheduled for no earlier than late December... Stay tuned!