Dead Artemis Spacecraft Careens Out of Lunar Orbit

One of NASA's lunar missions has ended.

The tumble of Artemis 1's Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEAScout) was caused by reports that NASA had been having trouble establishing communications with a cube-shaped satellite.

"NEAScout accompanied Artemis to the Moon but did a hard skid around and is shooting out of the Earth-Moon system entirely," he said.

The NEAScout was supposed to unfurl a 924- square-foot solar sail to get to the 2020 GE asteroid, but those plans have been scrapped.

Cube-Scattered

The CubeSat to Study Solar Particles, which NASA lost contact with about ten days ago, was released just over a month earlier. The loss of CuSP comms brought the total number of out-of-commission cubesats from the Artemis constellation to four.

There is no public trajectory data for the remaining nine Artemis cubesats, as the Harvard astronomer stated.

It was the same as before.

The NASA capsule that came back from the moon is shown in close up.