The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived

After a journey of nearly five months, the small CAPSTONE spacecraft has entered into lunar orbit.

Jim Free, NASA's chief of exploration systems development, said on Sunday that the agency received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in a near-rectilinear halo. It just finished its first burn. They will be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the moon over the next few days.

This is an important position for NASA because it is very stable and requires just a small amount of propellant to hold it. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long circle passes within 3000 km of the lunar surface. The lunar gateway will be a small space station built by NASA.

The agency is getting started. The mission was supported financially by a grant from NASA. Advanced Space, a Colorado-based company, and Terran Orbital collaborated to develop a small, 12U cubesat with a mass of 25 kilograms. It would fit inside a mini-refrigerator.

At the end of June, the spaceship was launched on a New Zealand-based rocket. This was the first deep space mission for the company.

A lunar transfer that uses the Sun's gravity to follow an expansive trajectory took almost five months to complete. There was a spinning issue that flight controllers were able to solve. This was a roundabout path that took the craft to a distance of more than three times that between the Earth and the Moon before it reentered the atmosphere.

The burn done by CAPSTONE on Sunday evening was very small. The weight of nine pieces of standard printer paper is equal to the amount of time the vehicle burned its thruster.

A new system of autonomously navigation around and near the Moon will be demonstrated with the help of CAPSTONE. As the cislunar environment gets more crowded, there is a lack of fixed tracking assets near the Moon.

There is a plan for the mission to operate for six months.