Capstone, or the Cislunar Autonomous Navigation System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, launched on June 28 from New Zealand, and everything appeared to be running smoothly for the small 55-pound satellite during and after liftoff. “The spacecraft team is currently working to understand the cause and reestablish contact,” read a post on the Nasa blog at 12.29pm. EDT Tuesday. The spacecraft successfully separated from the upper stage of a Rocket Labs Photon rocket on July 4, with the rocket setting the spacecraft on a slow but efficient trajectory designed to place it in orbit around the Moon by mid-November. Capstone is designed to explore an unusual orbit that Nasa hopes will eventually host a space station to help lunar astronauts as they begin exploring the Moon’s south pole later this decade. It’s unclear whether or not this mission is at risk, but according to a Nasa update, the communication failure appears to be in the Capstone and not the Deep Space Network, an array of large antennas that Nasa uses to communicate with missions beyond. from earth orbit. Capstone, “experienced communication problems while contacting the Deep Space Network,” says the Nasa blog. “The team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station passes with the Deep Space Network.” That trajectory information, the blog post adds, will allow ground controllers to delay for a few days the course correction maneuvers necessary to steer Capstone in the right direction, buying engineers more time to figure out what happened and potentially correct. Nasa will provide further updates on Capstone on the space agency’s blog.
