Engineers Fred Whisnant and Jennifer Vollmer check out communication systems during a big voice test Aug. 21, 2018, at the Space Launch System (SLS) Engineering Support Center in the Huntsville Operations Support Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The test verified that all systems are “go” when it comes to voice communications for the first integrated flight of the SLS deep space rocket and the Orion spacecraft: Exploration Mission-1. During the test, participants used headsets and voice loops to communicate with 13 locations across America including, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the U.S. Air Force’s Patrick Air Force and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, as well as many NASA contractor sites around the country. The support center allows experts who designed and built SLS to work together, saving agency resources by minimizing the need for travel to the Kennedy launch site. Leading up to launch, the Marshall team along with teams from Johnson and Kennedy will conduct numerous tests to verify video, data and other systems in the new mission support room. This week, in addition to the voice tests, Orion completed a series of tests to ensure the spacecraft and mission controllers at Johnson can flawlessly communicate through NASA’s satellite networks in space and on the ground when Orion and its crew are far from Earth on missions to the Moon and beyond. These tests will culminate in full-up mission simulations to ensure engineers and technicians from across the country are virtually connected during the countdown, launch and flight of the world’s most powerful rocket and the Orion spacecraft.
Image credit: NASA/Tyler Martin