WELLINGTON, New Zealand –
A satellite the size of a microwave oven successfully broke free from Earth orbit on Monday and headed for the moon, the latest step in NASA’s plan to land astronauts back on the lunar surface.
It was already an unusual journey for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon as it orbits the moon using minimal energy.
Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told The Associated Press it was hard to put his excitement into words.
“It will probably take a while to sink in. It was a project that took us two, two and a half years, and it’s just incredibly, incredibly difficult to do,” he said. “So to see it all together tonight and to see this spacecraft on its way to the moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”
Beck said the mission’s relatively low cost — NASA pegged it at $32.7 million — marks the beginning of a new era for space exploration.
“For a few tens of millions of dollars, there’s already a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “This is an insane ability that has never existed before.”
If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to make a new orbit around the moon, called a nearly rectilinear halo orbit: a stretched egg shape with one end of the orbit passing close to the moon and the other away from her.
Eventually, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway in an orbital path from which astronauts can land on the surface of the moon as part of the Artemis program.
Beck said the advantage of the new orbit is that it minimizes fuel use and allows the satellite – or space station – to remain in constant contact with Earth.
The Electron rocket, which launched on June 28 from New Zealand, carried a second spacecraft called Photon, which separated after nine minutes. The satellite was carried for six days in the Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines firing periodically to raise its orbit farther and farther from Earth.
Monday’s final engine blast allowed the Photon to break away from Earth’s gravity and send the satellite on its way. Now the plan is for the 25-kilogram (55-pound) satellite to fly far beyond the moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit on Nov. 13. The satellite will use small amounts of fuel to make several planned course corrections to the trajectory along the way.
Beck said they will decide in the coming days what to do with the Photon, which has completed its missions and still has some fuel in the tank.
“There are a lot of cool missions that we can actually do with it,” Beck said.
For the mission, NASA teamed up with two commercial companies: California-based Rocket Lab and Colorado-based Advanced Space, which owns and operates the Capstone satellite.
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