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Sometimes the best things in life come in small packages. Look no further than NASA’s next mission to send a microwave-sized satellite to the moon.
The agency is set to launch the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology (CAPSTONE) Operation and Navigation Experiment, a 55-pound lunar satellite that could fit comfortably on a shelf. What it lacks in size, it will more than make up for in its mission to chart a unique orbit around the moon that will one day house a lunar outpost for the Artemis program.
The launch is scheduled for June 27 at 5:50 a.m. EST. Carrying CAPSTONE to the cosmos will be Rocket Lab, a New Zealand-based private space company that made headlines last month when it managed to catch a falling rocket booster using a helicopter (type of). The company will use the same type of small rocket, dubbed the Electron, to send the satellite into low Earth orbit, although it won’t attempt another rocket booster helicopter capture.
“This mission is incredibly complex, and it’s the greatest performance we’ve ever tried to get from the Electron rocket,” Peter Beck, CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, told The Daily Beast. He later added that “it’s going to be very different” from the helicopter grab last month.
The CAPSTONE mission will host several firsts. For one thing, CAPSTONE will be the first spacecraft to embark on a unique orbit known as a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), which will take it on an elongated oval path around the moon, as close than 1,000 miles from one lunar pole and up to 43,500 miles from the other pole. The spacecraft will also be in sight of Earth at all times, allowing it to communicate with its controllers on land. This is the predicted orbit of the future moon Gateway Outposta planned space station that will provide support for crewed lunar explorations and more.
Exploring that orbit is “the heart of this mission,” Beck said. “The satellite will allow us to test this orbit and understand, from a communication and stability point of view, how it works. This allows future programs to place things like space stations and orbiting nodes there to go to the Moon and also to Mars.
Oddly enough, NASA already has plenty of modeling data and information indicating that this orbit will work just fine for a future outpost. However, the agency still believes CAPSTONE is important in demonstrating the viability of NRHO for performing spacecraft-to-spacecraft communication relayed by a NASA satellite already in orbit around the moon. This will lay the foundation for future Gateway communications with lunar spacecraft.
Highly elliptical, a nearly rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon takes advantage of a precise balance point in the Earth’s and Moon’s gravities and creates ideal stability for long-range missions like Gateway.
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Highly elliptical, a nearly rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon takes advantage of a precise balance point in the Earth’s and Moon’s gravities and creates ideal stability for long-range missions like Gateway.
Advanced Space
All in all, CAPSTONE is effectively the de facto first mission of Project Artemis, the long-awaited but oft-delayed successor to Apollo, tasked with bringing humans back to the moon and laying the groundwork for the establishment of a lunar colony. Even Chris Baker, principal engineer at NASA’s Space Technology Missions Directorate, admitted to Ars-Technica in an interview that there isn’t too much to learn from the mission that the modeling hasn’t already predicted. However, it is still important to be able to validate the theories and finally get the embattled project literally off the ground.
The mission will also mark the first time a commercial rocket has made a trip to the moon. Additionally, CAPSTONE itself was developed and will be controlled by Advanced Space, a US-based private space company. It’s yet another signal that the future of NASA – and space exploration as we know it – will rest squarely on the shoulders of private companies, which have both offered great potential for innovation and of efficiency, and also the risk of very costly breakdowns.
“I think it’s a real credit for NASA to focus on the things it’s really good at and allow industry to focus on the things it’s really good at,” Beck said. “We are very excited. It is an extremely complex, extremely difficult and quite risky mission. But, if everything works out, it will be a big reward.
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 1 for the NASA ELaNa19 mission.
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