NASA’s tiny lunar probe CAPSTONE is back in touch with its handlers, ending a brief but eerie period of silence.
55-pound (25 kilograms) CAPSTONE went dark on Monday (July 4), shortly after it split from Rocket Lab Photon spaceship bus and heading for the moon. The mission team immediately set about troubleshooting and their efforts have already been rewarded.
“We have restored communication with CAPSTONE. The spaceship looks happy and healthy. More details to come,” Colorado-based Advanced Space, which is managing the mission for NASA, said. said via Twitter today (opens in new tab) (July 6).
Connected: Why NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE probe will take so long to reach the Moon
CAPSTONE launched into Earth orbit atop a Rocket Lab Electron accelerator on June 28, then spent a week spiraling further and further away from our planet via random photon engine burns. The latest photon firing, on Monday, provided enough of a kick to send CAPSTONE on its way to The moonand the cubesat separated from the spacecraft bus shortly thereafter.
CAPSTONE then hit several other milestones in quick succession; the microwave oven-sized craft deployed its solar arrays as planned, for example, and began preparing its onboard propulsion system for its first engine, NASA officials said in an update yesterday (opens in new tab) (July 5). CAPSTONE contacted the mission team twice through NASA Deep Space Network shortly after the breakup, but then went dark for reasons that remain mysterious.
The loss of contact forced the CAPSTONE team to postpone the first burn of the cubesat’s trajectory correction engine, which was scheduled for yesterday. But it shouldn’t be a big deal; spacecraft has enough fuel to handle a delay of “several days” in this initial burn, NASA officials said in another update yesterday (opens in new tab).
CAPSTONE is on its way to a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon, a highly elliptical trajectory that NASA has chosen for its Gateway space station. No spacecraft has ever occupied a lunar NRHO, and CAPSTONE is tasked with verifying its stability for Gateway, a key part of NASA Artemis program of lunar exploration.
It will take CAPSTONE (short for “Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment”) some time to reach its destination. Since it was launched aboard the 58-foot-tall (19-meter) Electron — a rocket designed to lift small satellites into Earth orbit — the cubesat takes a long, circuitous and extremely fuel-efficient route to the moon. If all goes according to plan, CAPSTONE will enter its NRHO on November 13.
Mike Wall is the author of “There (opens in new tab)’ (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
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