WASHINGTON — A 12 months after its launch, a privately owned, NASA-funded cubesat orbiting the moon continues to work well, providing data to support the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration efforts.
The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) spacecraft, owned by Colorado startup Advanced Space, began its journey to the moon last July after its launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. After overcoming communications and thruster problems, the spacecraft entered a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) across the moon in November.
CAPSTONE has accomplished a six-month primary mission in that orbit and is now in an “enhanced” mission slated to last at the least a 12 months. “For us, the improved mission really just gets into focusing in on some more of the automation experiments and attempting to collect more data,” Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Advanced Space, said in an interview. “We will try some recent things. We will push the envelope.”
The spacecraft has been working well, with only minor technical issues, since reaching the moon. “We got through lots of challenges to get to the moon,” he said. “Once we got there, we settled into an operational cadence, which really helped inform lots of the evaluation that’s being done by the Gateway team on the Johnson Space Center and others to learn the best way to operate there.”
NASA funded development of CAPSTONE to check the steadiness of NRHO, which will probably be utilized by the lunar Gateway that the agency and international partners will develop over the course of several Artemis missions. That’s included insights on the best way to conduct stationkeeping maneuvers to take care of the orbit and the best way to perform navigation.
Cheetham described as “phenomenal” his company’s relationship with NASA’s Gateway program, which predates development of CAPSTONE. “The teamwork between evaluation for Gateway and planning for CAPSTONE has been almost seamless,” he said, with an exchange of knowledge that has each supported planning for Gateway and operations of CAPSTONE. “That backwards and forwards has been prefer it’s almost one team.”
Advanced Space has also used CAPSTONE to check autonomous navigation technologies. After several attempts, the spacecraft established a crosslink with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, testing the “CAPS” a part of the mission’s name. They’ve also used a chip-scale atomic clock on the cubesat to find out its location using timing information from signals uplinked to it from ground stations.
The experience from CAPSTONE will help Advanced Space on its next spacecraft mission called Oracle for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The corporate won a $72 million contract from AFRL in November 2022 to develop a smallsat, previously often known as the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, to observe cislunar space and exhibit positioning and navigation techniques beyond Earth orbit.
“We all know what these systems can do and where they could have problems,” he said, allowing the corporate to deal with novel points of the mission. “We’ll really give you the chance to place our attention on the brand new things which might be different from CAPSTONE or the things which might be potentially harder.”
Advanced Space, besides operating CAPSTONE and developing Oracle, recently announced it’s supporting ESCAPADE, a NASA smallsat mission to check the interaction of Mars with the solar wind, with mission design and navigation. It’s also a part of a team led by Draper that won a NASA Business Lunar Payload Services award to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon.
CAPSTONE, meanwhile, may operate well beyond the one-year enhanced mission. Cheetham said the essential concern is the results of radiation on the spacecraft’s electronics, particularly because the sun approaches the height of its 11-year activity cycle. Fault protection systems on the cubesat have recovered it from several radiation-induced upsets to date, however it’s uncertain how much of a complete dose those systems can receive before they degrade.
Propellant, he added, just isn’t a priority. “We have now loads of delta-V margin and gotten efficient on the best way to deploy it,” he said. “As a mission led and managed by orbital mechanics, we’ve got loads of fuel. We won’t run out of fuel on this system.”