NASA’s CAPSTONE Successfully Burns First Engine Toward the Moon for 11 Minutes

NASA's 55-pound CAPSTONE successfully carried out its first engine burn, an 11-minute maneuver that began at 8:30 am EDT and changed its velocity by 72 kph as planned.

As a Space.com report specified, CAPSTONE has "bounced back from the recent communication dropout."

NASA officials said that the space agency's moon probe is approximately 465,000 kilometers from Earth.

That is substantially outside the moon's orbit, although it's part of the plan. The probe takes a long, looping, and highly fuel-efficient path to be delivered to lunar orbit on November 13.

Contact Reestablished

The recent burn was, at first, supposed to occur on July 5, although the CAPSTONE team moved to a couple of days later after it briefly lost contact with the CubeSat.

A related TechCrunch report said that communication loss occurred on July 4, shortly after the moon probe separated from its Rocket Lab Photon spacecraft bus and started its long solo trek to the moon.

Essentially, CAPSTONE launched on June 28 on top of a Rocket Lab Electron booster, then spent one week in the orbit of Earth, spiraling farther and farther from this planet through Photon engine burns.

The CAPSTONE team announced early this week that it had "reestablished contact" with the probe, with a size similar to the microwave. More so, mission engineers have figured out already what caused the dropout.

Implementing Recovery Procedures

Earlier this week, while examining inconsistent CAPSTONE ranging data noticed by the NASA Deep Space Network technicians, the operations team of the spacecraft attempted to access diagnostic data on the spacecraft's radio and sent an inadequately formatted command that made the radio inoperable.

The team also said the spacecraft fault detention system should have rebooted the radio immediately, although it did not work because of a fault in the spacecraft flight software.

The flight software system of the CAPSTONE eventually cleared the fault and brought back the spacecraft into communication with the ground, enabling the team to implement recovery procedures and start to command the spacecraft again, FOX News said in a similar report.

The moon probe is currently fully up to speed if the current burn is any specification. More so, it will get a chance to strut its stuff again soon-the mission team is planning to conduct yet another trajectory-correcting burn come weekend.

Series of Burns to Follow

There will be a series of other burns, enabling CAPSTONE to refine its course headed for the moon.

If everything goes as planned, the CubeSat will slide into a highly elliptical NRHO or near recliner halo orbit around Earth's nearest neighbor approximately four months from now.

Essentially, the lunar NRHO is believed to be highly stable, which explains the reason NASA opted for it for its Gateway space station, a vital part of the Artemis program of moon exploration of the agency.

However, no spacecraft has ever occupied a lunar NRHO before. CAPSTONE will spend at least six months in orbit, helping engineers and mission planners validate its purported stability.

According to NASA officials, CAPSTONE carries two technology demonstrations that could help future spacecraft navigate near the moon minus as much tracking from Earth as is presently required.

CAPSTONE is a NASA project; although Advanced Space, a Colorado company, is operating the mission under a $20 contract, the space was awarded in 2019.

Related information about NASA's Capstone is shown on NASA's YouTube video below:

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