![]() ![]() The plan now is for the 25kg satellite to far overshoot the Moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit on 13 November. The satellite was carried for six days in Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines firing periodically to raise its orbit further and further from Earth.Ī final engine burst on Monday allowed Photon to break from the Earth’s gravitational pull and send the satellite on its way. The Electron rocket that launched on 28 June from New Zealand was carrying a second spacecraft called Photon, which separated after nine minutes. The near-rectilinear halo orbit, as it is known, is a stretched-out egg shape, with one end of the orbit passing close to the Moon and the other far from it.Įventually, Nasa plans to put a space station called Gateway into the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the Moon’s surface as part of its Artemis programme.īeck said the advantage of the new orbit is that it minimises fuel use and allows the satellite – or a space station – to stay in constant contact with Earth. If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to take a new orbit around the Moon. “It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.” “For some tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the Moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” he said. “To see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the Moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”īeck said the relatively low cost of the mission – Nasa put it at $32.7m dollars (£27m) – marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration. It’s been a project that has taken us two, two-and-a-half years and is just incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute. Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said it was hard to put his excitement into words: “It’s probably going to take a while to sink in. ![]() It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the Moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of its small Electron rockets. It has been an unusual journey already for the Capstone satellite. The solar-powered small satellite is shown here with its solar arrays extended in a Georgia Tech clean room.The planned course of action is the latest step in Nasa’s ambition to land astronauts on the lunar surface again. In early 2022, NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission underwent tests to prepare it for launch. ![]() The mission was selected by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems in 2014 and is currently funded by the Small Spacecraft Technology program within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. The observations made by the low-cost mission will provide unambiguous information about the presence of water ice deposits inside craters that would be an valuable in-situ resource for future Artemis missions to the lunar surface.Īs a technology demonstration mission, Lunar Flashlight will showcase several technological firsts, including being the first mission to look for water ice using a laser reflectometer and the first planetary CubeSat mission to use "green" propulsion - a propellant that is less toxic and safer than hydrazine, a common propellant used by spacecraft. Roughly the size of a briefcase, Lunar Flashlight is a very small satellite being developed and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that will use near-infrared lasers and an onboard spectrometer to map ice in permanently shadowed regions near the Moon's south pole. ![]()
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