NASA Satellite Departs Earth Orbit and Heads for the Moon – Kashmir Reader

A satel­lite the size of a microwave oven suc­cess­ful­ly de-orbit­ed Earth Mon­day and is head­ing for the moon, the lat­est step in NASA’s plan to return astro­nauts to the lunar surface.
It was already an unusu­al jour­ney for the Cap­stone satel­lite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Penin­su­la by the Rock­et Lab com­pa­ny in one of their small elec­tron rock­ets. It will take anoth­er four months for the satel­lite to reach the moon as it flies with min­i­mal ener­gy expenditure.
Rock­et Lab founder Peter Beck told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press it was hard to put his excite­ment into words.
“It will prob­a­bly take a while for us to set­tle in. It was a project that took us two, two and a half years and it’s just incred­i­bly, incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to do,” he said. “So to see it all come togeth­er tonight and to see this space­craft head­ing to the moon is just absolute­ly epic.”
Beck said the mis­sion’s rel­a­tive­ly low cost — NASA put it at $32.7 mil­lion — marked the begin­ning of a new era for space exploration.
“For tens of mil­lions of dol­lars, there’s now a rock­et and space­craft that can take you to the moon, to aster­oids, to Venus and to Mars,” Beck said. “It’s an amaz­ing abil­i­ty that’s nev­er been seen before.”
If the rest of the mis­sion is suc­cess­ful, the Cap­stone satel­lite will send back impor­tant infor­ma­tion for months as it becomes the first to adopt a new orbit around the moon called the near-straight line halo orbit: a sprawled egg shape with one end of the orbit close to the moon over and the oth­er far away.
Even­tu­al­ly, NASA plans to launch a space sta­tion called Gate­way from which astro­nauts can descend to the lunar sur­face as part of its Artemis program.
Accord­ing to Beck, the ben­e­fit of the new orbit is that it min­i­mizes fuel burn and allows the satel­lite — or a space sta­tion — to stay in con­stant con­tact with Earth.
The Elec­tron rock­et, launched from New Zealand on June 28, car­ried a sec­ond space­craft called Pho­ton, which sep­a­rat­ed after nine min­utes. The satel­lite was trans­port­ed in pho­tons for six days, with the space­craft’s engines fir­ing peri­od­i­cal­ly to push its orbit far­ther and far­ther from Earth.
A final engine fail­ure on Mon­day allowed Pho­ton to break free of Earth­’s grav­i­ty and send the satel­lite on its way. The plan now calls for the 25-kilo­gram satel­lite to rock­et far beyond the moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit on Novem­ber 13th.
Beck said they would decide in the com­ing days what to do with Pho­ton, which has com­plet­ed its duties and still has some fuel in the tank.
“There’s a bunch of real­ly cool mis­sions we can do with it,” Beck said.
For the mis­sion, NASA has part­nered with two com­mer­cial com­pa­nies: Cal­i­for­nia-based Rock­et Lab and Col­orado-based Advanced Space, which owns and oper­ates the Cap­stone satellite.
—agen­cies