NASA wants to experiment with a new orbit around the Moon that it hopes to use in the coming years to return astronauts to the lunar surface.
Therefore, it is sending a test satellite from New Zealand. The initial stages of the launch took place as planned on Tuesday afternoon, with the rocket carrying the satellite arriving into space.
If the rest of the mission is successful, the CAPSTONE CubeSat satellite, only the size of a microwave oven, will be the first to take the new path around the Moon and send vital information for at least six months.
Technically, the new orbit is called an almost rectilinear halo orbit. It is a stretched egg shape with one end passing near the moon and the other far from it.
Imagine pulling an elastic band back from your thumb. Your thumb would represent the moon and the rubber band the flight path.
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“It will have balance. Balance. Balance,” NASA wrote on its website. “This research CubeSat will virtually be able to recede and rest on a gravitational sweet spot in space, where the attraction of Earth’s gravity and the Moon interact to allow for an almost stable orbit.”
Finally, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway on the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the surface of the Moon as part of its Artemis program.
Group effort
For the satellite mission, NASA teamed up with two commercial companies. Rocket Lab, based in California, launched the rocket carrying the satellite, which in turn is owned and operated by Colorado-based Advanced Space.
The mission was assembled relatively quickly and cheaply for NASA, with a total mission cost of $ 32.7 million.
Putting the 25-kilo satellite into orbit will take more than four months and will be done in three stages.
First, the small Rocket Lab Electron rocket was launched from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Just nine minutes later, the second stage called Photon separated and entered orbit around the Earth. Over the next five days, Photon’s engines are scheduled to fire periodically to raise their orbit farther and farther from Earth.
Six days after launch, Photon’s engines will ignite for the last time, allowing him to escape from Earth’s orbit and head for the Moon.
Photon will then release the satellite, which has its own small propulsion system but will not use much energy as it crosses to the moon for four months, with some trajectory corrections planned along the way.
“Perfect Electron Launch!” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck tweeted Tuesday. “The lunar photon is in low Earth orbit.”
Rocket Lab spokesman Morgan Bailey said it was the most ambitious and complex mission he has carried out to date and comes after more than two years of working with NASA and Advanced Space. He said it will be the first time Rocket Lab has tested its HyperCurie engine that will be used to power Photon.
“Certainly a lot of hard-to-solve problems along the way, but we marked them one by one and got to the launch day,” Bailey said.
Bailey said one of the advantages of the orbit is that, theoretically, a space station should be able to maintain continuous communication with Earth because it will avoid being overshadowed by the Moon.