Wahana Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) belongs to the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which had lost contact was reported to have succeeded in its first stage on its voyage to the Moon.
The Capstone vehicle was previously reported to have lost contact after its launch on Monday (4/7). This issue is said to have an impact on the delay of CAPSTONE’s first “path correction maneuver” scheduled for Tuesday (5/7).
Quoted from Space, the maneuver correction of the 25 kilogram vehicle was finally carried out on Thursday (7/7). Maneuver engine burn which took 11 minutes started at 08.30 EDT (19.30 WIB) and changed its speed to 72 kilometers per hour.
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According to NASA staff, CAPSTONE is now 465,000 kilometers from Earth. This distance is actually outside the moon’s orbit, but that’s part of the plan. CAPSTONE takes a long, iterative and highly fuel-efficient path that will land it in lunar orbit on November 13.
Furthermore, CAPSTONE who lost contact managed to restore communication on Wednesday (6/7), and the technicians managed to find out the cause of the loss of contact.
On Monday (4/7), while investigating inconsistent CAPSTONE distance data noticed by technicians with NASA’s Deep Space Network, the spacecraft operations team attempted to access diagnostic data on the spacecraft radio and sent an incorrectly formatted command that made radio cannot be operated.
“The spacecraft’s fault detection system should have restarted the radio immediately but not because of an error in the spacecraft’s flight software,” NASA said in a statement. update the information.
“CASTONE’s autonomous flight software system finally cleared the error and brought the spacecraft back into communication with Earth, allowing the team to apply recovery procedures and start commanding the spacecraft again.”
Quoted from the site NASACAPSTONE will fly in the Moon’s nearly rectilinear halo (NRHO) orbit for at least six months to study orbital dynamics similar to those aimed at Gateway, the human and scientific exploration lunar space station that is part of the Artemis project.
Two technology demos on CAPSTONE are said to be able to support future spacecraft to navigate near the Moon without much of the need for Earth.
(lom/arh)
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