Thursday, September 3, 2009

Ares SRB test fault isolated

The new five-segment Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), one segment longer than it's familiar Space Shuttle progenitor, came within 20 seconds of it's first test firing in Utah, last week, at Alliant Techsystems (ATK) facility west of Brigham City.

Technicians think they have isolated the problem to a switch that failed to activate a necessary chemical reaction, probably because of a failure of the over-all electrical ground fault assembly on the SRB test platform.

A second attempt to test the new Ares SRB has been preliminarily rescheduled for Sept. 10.

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