Flight controllers have lost contact with a small pathfinder spacecraft launched last week to test an unusual lunar orbit planned for NASA's Artemis moon program, officials said.
Flight controllers have lost contact with a small pathfinder spacecraft launched last week to test an unusual lunar orbit planned for NASA's Artemis moon program, officials said Tuesday. Engineers are troubleshooting and attempting to re-establish communications.
Spacecraft commissioning proceeded normally for the first 11 hours. But during a second communications pass"an anomaly was experienced related to the communications subsystem," Advanced Space said on its website. "One of the benefits of the BLT, the designed trajectory, is its robustness to delays such as this," the company said in its web update. The and system margins provide time to resolve and understand this anomaly before proceeding with the first trajectory correction maneuver."
The ballistic lunar transfer trajectory will carry it more than 800,000 miles from Earth — more than three times the 240,000-mile distance between Earth and moon — before it reaches a point in mid-November when it can slip into the planned"near rectilinear halo orbit," or NRHO, around the moon's poles.
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