CAPSTONE on Target to Reach Lunar Orbit After Troubled Journey

NASA’s CAPSTONE carried out its fourth of six deliberate trajectory correction maneuvers on Thursday, October 27, setting the stage for the spacecraft’s arrival to an elliptical halo lunar orbit in lower than two weeks.

The 55-pound cubesat fired its propulsion system for 220 seconds throughout the deliberate maneuver, Advanced Space, the personal firm managing the mission for NASA, defined in an update. The mission’s fourth trajectory correction maneuver transpired late final week, shifting CAPSTONE ever nearer to its final vacation spot: the lunar Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO). The probe is predicted to achieve its operational orbit on November 13.

Advanced Space says the probe was 308,076 miles (495,800 kilometers) from Earth on the time of the maneuver, or about 69,000 miles (111,000 km) previous the Moon. NASA and its companions are utilizing the ballistic lunar transfer (BLT) method to switch CAPSTONE to NRHO which, although convoluted and lengthy, is extremely fuel-efficient. The spacecraft launched on June 28 and has been flying solo in house for the previous 4 months.

Once in NRHO, the $33 million cubesat will enter into uncharted territory, as no spacecraft has ever labored on this extremely elliptical orbit—one supposed for the upcoming Gateway house station. CAPSTONE, brief for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, will check this orbit for NASA, setting the stage for Gateway and the upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon.

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The newest trajectory correction maneuver “confirms the preparation, extensive analysis, teams working together and continued hard work to allow this mission to remain successful, especially following the recent anomaly,” Alec Forsman, CAPSTONE mission operations supervisor at Advanced Space, mentioned within the replace.

Indeed, the mission threatened to go sideways after the third course correction maneuver on September 8. CAPSTONE, constructed by Terran Orbital, misplaced axis management and started tumbling, a severe scenario that threatened to derail whole the mission. Unable to level its photo voltaic panels towards the Sun, CAPSTONE wasn’t in a position to absolutely recharge.

The restoration staff finally traced the issue to {a partially} opened valve on one of many spacecraft’s eight thrusters, which the staff remedied with a restoration sequence transmitted to CAPSTONE a full month after the anomaly. As NASA adds: “The mission team will design future maneuvers to work around the affected valve, including the two remaining trajectory correction maneuvers scheduled before CAPSTONE’s arrival to orbit at the Moon.”

With the fourth trajectory correction maneuver full, CAPSTONE is now days away from reaching its orbit across the Moon and coming into into the demonstration section of the mission. The probe will spend at the least six months gathering operational knowledge and testing autonomous spacecraft-to-spacecraft navigation capabilities, the latter of which may finally result in spacecraft able to figuring out their very own areas in house with out outdoors assist. An early profitable check, wherein NASA’s Deep Space Network facilitated a dialog between CAPSTONE and the company’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, is a promising begin to the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System demonstration, as Advanced Space calls it.

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