The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment or CAPSTONE has had a rather rough time and it hasn’t even started working yet.
Not only was the launch of the satellite delayed, NASA has now lost contact with CAPSTONE en route to the Moon.
The spacefaring agency says that the communications issues arose while the spacecraft was in contact with the Deep Space Network.
“The spacecraft team currently is working to understand the cause and re-establish contact. The team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network. If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days,” NASA wrote in an update.
The CAPSTONE mission is part of the Artemis program and seeks to find a new orbital path for spacecraft as humanity returns to the Moon. This orbital path is known as a near rectilinear halo orbit and it would require less energy from spacecraft to maintain.
The CubeSat was expected to reach the Moon within four months following its launch on 28th June. However, now that NASA has lost communication with the satellite we are curious how this affects timelines.
For now, the only delay is to small corrections that were to be made to so that CAPSTONE’s approach to the Moon would be more accurate.
This is an unfortunate risk that comes with launching satellites into space, sometimes they arrive at their destination just fine and sometimes, well, they just don’t.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
