Success! NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE probe arrives at the moon

A tiny NASA spacecraft’s historic trek to the moon is over.

The 55-pound (25 kilograms) CAPSTONE probe slipped into orbit across the moon on Sunday night (Nov. 13), turning into the primary cubesat ever to go to Earth’s nearest neighbor.

The milestone got here after a profitable engine burn that ended at 7:39 p.m. EST (0039 GMT on Nov. 14), NASA officers said in a brief update (opens in new tab).

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

The maneuver put CAPSTONE (quick for “Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Know-how Operations and Navigation Experiment”) right into a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) across the moon, a extremely elliptical path that may also be occupied by NASA’s Gateway space station.

NASA plans to launch the primary items of Gateway, a vital a part of its Artemis program of moon exploration, in 2024. However the company desires to be taught extra about lunar NRHOs first, and that is the place CAPSTONE is available in: The microwave-oven-sized spacecraft will confirm the suspected stability of this orbit, which a spacecraft has by no means flown in earlier than, throughout a mission designed to final not less than six months.

CAPSTONE may also carry out some communication and navigation exams, a few of them in live performance with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping across the moon since 2009.

CAPSTONE is not able to get to work simply but, nonetheless; it nonetheless must fine-tune its path across the moon.

“Two smaller correction maneuvers will happen this week to make sure the spacecraft is confirmed into the complicated lunar orbit,” representatives of the Colorado firm Superior Area, which owns CAPSTONE and operates the cubesat for NASA, wrote in an update Sunday night (opens in new tab).

CAPSTONE’s path to lunar orbit was a bit bumpy. The probe launched atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster on June 28, kicking off a circuitous, extremely fuel-efficient 4.5-month-long trek that adopted gravitational contours.

The CAPSTONE staff lost contact with the probe on July 4, simply after it separated from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus. They rapidly recognized and stuck the issue, an improperly formatted command, getting CAPSTONE again on observe the subsequent day.

CAPSTONE bumped into extra bother two months later. The probe suffered a glitch throughout a trajectory-correcting engine burn on Sept. 8; it started to tumble and went into a protective safe mode consequently. 

The mission staff traced this drawback to a wonky valve in CAPSTONE’s propulsion system, troubleshot it, and obtained the probe back on course for its historic lunar arrival.

Different cubesats will quickly observe in CAPSTONE’s footsteps, if all goes based on plan. NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission is scheduled to launch on Nov. 16, sending the company’s Orion capsule on an uncrewed shakeout cruise to lunar orbit. Artemis 1 may also loft 10 ride-along cubesats, a few of which can research the moon. 

A kind of little craft, Japan’s OMOTENASHI (“Excellent Moon exploration Applied sciences demonstrated by Nano Semi-Laborious Impactor”), will even put a tiny lander down on the moon.

Although CAPSTONE is a lunar trailblazer, it is not the primary cubesat to transcend Earth orbit. That distinction goes to NASA’s MarCO-A and MarCO-B probes, also referred to as Wall-E and Eva, which launched with the company’s InSight Mars lander in Could 2018. The 2 cubesats helped beam house information throughout InSight’s Purple Planet landing six months later and likewise managed to photograph Mars.

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