NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE probe suffers problem on its journey to the moon

September 15, 2022

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NASA’s little CAPSTONE spacecraft has hit one other hurdle on its lengthy highway to the moon.

Towards the top of a significant engine burn on Thursday night (Sept. 8), the 55-pound (25 kilograms) CAPSTONE skilled an anomaly that put the probe in a protecting “protected mode,” mission workforce members stated.

The glitch “resulted within the car perspective [orientation] charges rising past the capability of the onboard response wheels to regulate and counter,” representatives of the Colorado firm Superior House, which operates the CAPSTONE mission for NASA, wrote in an update on Monday (opens in new tab) (Sept. 12).

“The car was making an attempt to speak with the bottom for roughly 24 hours earlier than any telemetry was recovered,” they added. “On the level of restoration, the spacecraft was not in a secure configuration, it was not energy constructive and the system was experiencing periodic resets.”

Associated: Why it’ll take NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE probe so long to reach the moon

CAPSTONE workforce members have been working across the clock since then to cope with the still-mysterious drawback, in response to the replace, they usually’ve made some progress. For instance, the workforce has reconfigured the “operational state” of the spacecraft, serving to to stabilize the state of affairs. CAPSTONE can also be now energy constructive, which means its solar arrays are producing extra vitality than the probe is consuming.

The mission workforce continues working to diagnose the issue, “enhance the thermal state of affairs” of among the spacecraft’s subsystems and put together for a coming “detumble” operation.

“A profitable detumble will end result within the car resuming management of its orientation, orienting the solar panels to the sun to completely cost the batteries of the facility used through the detumble,” the replace states. “The spacecraft will then orient to the bottom and await additional directions. These restoration operations might be additional evaluated over the approaching days.”

CAPSTONE, which is concerning the dimension of a microwave oven, launched atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster on June 28. The spacecraft is headed to the moon — particularly, a lunar close to rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), the identical one which might be utilized by NASA’s Gateway space station within the coming years.

CAPSTONE will confirm the presumed stability of the NRHO forward of the arrival of Gateway, which is a key a part of NASA’s Artemis moon program. The cubesat may also conduct navigation and communications experiments, a few of them in cooperation with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

CAPSTONE’s journey is an extended one; it isn’t scheduled to succeed in its lunar vacation spot till Nov. 13. Thursday’s engine burn helped hold it heading in the right direction for that arrival date. As a result of Thursday’s anomaly occurred close to the top of the maneuver, it seems CAPSTONE stays on its designated course, in response to Monday’s replace.

CAPSTONE has battled by an anomaly already: It went dark simply after deploying from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus on July 4. The mission workforce managed to repair that drawback, which was attributable to an improperly formatted command, a day later.

Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide concerning the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).