NASA has given up on the planned moon mission of its tiny Lunar Flashlight cubesat, which aimed to hunt for water ice in shadowy craters near the moon’s south pole.
The briefcase-sized Lunar Flashlight launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last December. It was a ride-along payload on a mission whose chief aim was to send the private Japanese company ispace’s robotic Hakuto-R lander toward the moon.
Lunar Flashlight was speculated to be moon-bound as well. But it surely experienced problems with its technology-demonstrating propulsion system, failing to generate enough thrust to succeed in lunar orbit as planned.
The mission team troubleshot the issue for nearly six months but couldn’t crack it. So, today (May 12), NASA announced that it was calling an end to Lunar Flashlight’s planned mission.
“Technology demonstrations are, by their nature, higher risk and high reward, they usually’re essential for NASA to check and learn,” Christopher Baker, program executive for Small Spacecraft Technology within the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in an announcement (opens in recent tab) today.
“Lunar Flashlight was highly successful from the standpoint of being a testbed for brand spanking new systems that had never flown in space before,” Baker added. “Those systems, and the teachings Lunar Flashlight taught us, can be used for future missions.”
Amongst those successes, NASA officials said, were the cubesat’s Sphinx flight computer, a low-power, radiation-resistant variant developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and the probe’s upgraded radio, often known as Iris.
“Featuring a brand new precision navigation capability, the radio may be utilized by future small spacecraft to rendezvous and land on solar system bodies,” NASA officials wrote in today’s statement.
The mission team also successfully tested Lunar Flashlight’s four-laser reflectometer, suggesting that it could indeed have spotted water ice on the floors of moon craters.
“It’s disappointing for the science team, and for the entire Lunar Flashlight team, that we cannot have the option to make use of our laser reflectometer to make measurements on the moon,” Barbara Cohen, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the identical statement.
“But like all the opposite systems, we collected a number of in-flight performance data on the instrument that can be incredibly priceless to future iterations of this method,” Cohen said.
Lunar Flashlight’s miniaturized propulsion system was a brand new style of technology as well, employing 3D-printed parts and “green” propellant. It seems that the thrusters’ fuel-feed system got clogged with some style of debris — metal shavings or powder, perhaps — that prevented them from firing at full capability, NASA officials said.
Mission team members tried several tactics to dislodge the debris, including increasing the fuel pressure to levels far above normal. But nothing worked in time for the probe to realize its planned lunar orbit.
But Lunar Flashlight is not necessarily dead. Many of the probe’s systems are still functioning well, and NASA could find yourself assigning it a brand new task.
“After having traveled out past the moon, Lunar Flashlight is now moving back toward Earth and can fly past our planet with an in depth approach of about 40,000 miles (65,000 kilometers) on May 17,” agency officials wrote in today’s update. “The cubesat will then proceed into deep space and orbit the sun. It continues to speak with mission operators, and NASA is weighing options for the long run of the spacecraft.”
Lunar Flashlight’s ride-along partner also failed to realize all of its mission goals: Hakuto-R ended up crashing during its lunar landing attempt on April 25. But, like Lunar Flashlight, the Japanese lander notched numerous successes along the way in which. For instance, it successfully reached lunar orbit, demonstrating the viability of lots of the systems ispace will use on future lunar missions.
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