The CAPSTONE moon probe is back to normal.
The first engine burn of the CAPSTONE took place this morning at 9:00 a.m. NASA officials said in an update that it changed its speed by 45 mph.
Agency officials said that CAPSTONE is close to Earth. The probe is taking a long, looping and highly fuel- efficient path that will take it to the moon in November.
It will take NASA a long time to reach the moon.
The burn was supposed to take place on Tuesday but the team lost contact with the cubesat. The communication loss happened shortly after CAPSTONE separated from its rocket lab bus and began its journey to the moon. CAPSTONE was launched on June 28 on a rocket and spent a week in Earth's atmosphere.
The team said that it had re-established contact with the probe. Mission engineers have been able to figure out what happened.
On Monday, while investigating inconsistent CAPSTONE ranging data noticed by technicians with NASA's Deep Space Network, the spacecraft operations team attempted to access diagnostic data on the spacecraft's radio and sent an improper formatted command that made the radio inoperable.
The fault detection system should have immediately rebooted the radio, but it didn't because of a fault in the software, they said. "CAPSTONE's flight software system eventually cleared the fault and brought the spacecraft back into communication with the ground, allowing the team to implement recovery procedures."
If today's burn is any indication, CAPSTONE is ready to go. The mission team plans to conduct another trajectory correction burn on Saturday.
CAPSTONE will be able to refine its course towards the moon after a number of other burns. If everything goes according to plan, the cubesat will travel around Earth's closest neighbor about four months from now.
The Gateway space station is an important part of the agency's Artemis program of moon exploration due to the fact that the lunar NR HO is thought to be stable. There has never been a space craft that has occupied a moon. Engineers and mission planners will be able to verify its supposed stability by spending at least six months in the space.
NASA officials have said that CAPSTONE has two technology demonstrations that could help future spaceships navigate near the moon without as much tracking as is currently required.
The space agency awarded a $20 million contract to Colorado company Advanced Space to operate a project called CAPSTONE.
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