Jakarta –
NASA has given up on a planned Moon mission from its small Lunar Flashlight cubesat, which aims to hunt for icy water in dark craters near the Moon’s south pole.
The suitcase-sized Lunar Flashlight launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last December. The small probe is a traveling payload on a mission whose sole purpose is to send the private Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R lander to the Moon.
Lunar Flashlight should also be Moon bound. However it ran into problems with the propulsion system which, demonstrating the technology, failed to generate enough thrust to reach lunar orbit as planned.
The mission team worked to solve the problem for nearly six months but were unable to solve it. Finally on May 12, NASA announced that it was ending its planned Lunar Flashlight mission.
“Technology demonstrations are, by nature, high risk and high reward, and that’s important for NASA to test and learn from,” said Christopher Baker, program executive for Small Spacecraft Technology in the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. , quoted from Space.com.
“Lunar Flashlight was very successful from the point of view of being a testbed for a new system that had never flown in space before. That system, and the lessons Lunar Flashlight taught us, will be used for future missions,” Baker added.
Among the successes, NASA officials said, were the flight computer Sphinx cubesat, a low-power, radiation-resistant variant developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and an enhanced radio known as Iris.
“Featuring new precision navigation capabilities, radio could be used by small spacecraft in the future to rendezvous with and land on Solar System bodies,” NASA said.
The mission team also successfully tested the Lunar Flashlight’s four-laser reflectometer, showing that the instrument could indeed see water ice at the bottom of the Moon’s craters.
“It is disappointing for the science team, and for the entire Lunar Flashlight team, that we will not be able to use our laser reflectometer to make measurements on the Moon,” said Barbara Cohen, mission principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“But like all systems, we collected a wealth of in-flight performance data on the instrument that will be invaluable for future iterations of this technique,” Cohen said.
The Lunar Flashlight miniature propulsion system is also a new breed of technology, using 3D printed components and environmentally friendly propellant. It appears that the thrusters’ fuel-feeding system was clogged with some type of debris, metal shavings or powder, which may have prevented them from firing at full capacity, NASA officials said.
Mission team members tried several tactics to get the debris out, including increasing fuel pressure to levels well above normal. But none made it in time for the probe to reach its planned Moon orbit.
But Lunar Flashlight isn’t necessarily dead. Most of the spacecraft’s systems were still functioning properly, and NASA could give him new assignments.
“After traveling past the Moon, Lunar Flashlight is now moving back toward Earth and will fly past our planet at a close distance of about 65,000 kilometers) on May 17,” said NASA.
The cubesat will then continue its journey into space and orbit the Sun. He will be in constant communication with mission operators, and NASA is considering options for the future of the spacecraft.
Lunar Flashlight’s travel partner also failed to achieve all of his mission objectives. Hakuto-R finally crashed during the Moon landing attempt on April 25. But, like Lunar Flashlight, the Japanese lander also had some success. For example, it successfully reached lunar orbit, demonstrating the feasibility of many systems that ispace will use on future lunar missions.
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(rns/afr)
2023-05-18 22:45:02
#NASA #Water #Ice #Moon
