The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, also known as Capstone, was launched on June 28 from New Zealand, and everything for the small, 55-pound satellite appeared to be operating normally both during and after liftoff.
Tuesday at 12:29 p.m. EDT, a Nasa blog post stated, “The spacecraft team is currently working to understand the cause and re-establish contact.”
On July 4, a Rocket Labs Photon rocket’s upper stage successfully separated from the spacecraft, which was then put on a slow but effective trajectory that would put it in orbit around the Moon by mid-November. Capstone is intended to investigate a peculiar orbit that NASA hopes will one day house a space station to assist lunar astronauts as they begin exploring the Moon’s south pole later this decade.
It’s unclear whether or not that mission is in danger, but a NASA update indicates that the communication problem appears to be with Capstone and not with the Deep Space Network, a system of big antennas that NASA uses to communicate with missions outside of Earth orbit.
According to the NASA blog, Capstone “experienced communications issues while in contact with the Deep Space Network.” Based on the first full and second partial ground station passes with the Deep Space Network, “the team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft.”
The blog post continues that by knowing the trajectory, ground controllers will be able to put off for a few days the course correction maneuvers required to get Capstone moving in the right direction, giving engineers more time to figure out what went wrong and potentially fix it.
More information about Capstone will be updated on the NASA blog.
