January 19: This article was updated to include information from a press conference the day after it was first published.
A spacecraft headed for the surface of the moon ended up on Earth instead, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere Thursday afternoon.
Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh announced a post on social network X that it lost contact with the Peregrine lunar lander at 3:50 p.m. eastern time, which served as an indication that it entered Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific at around 4:04 p.m.
On Friday, the United States Space Administration confirmed the destruction of Peregrine. Astrobotic will assemble a review board of space industry experts to figure out what went wrong.
It was a purposeful, if disappointing, end to a journey that lasted 10 days and covered more than half a million miles, with the craft traveling beyond the moon’s orbit before turning back toward Earth. But the spacecraft never got close to its landing destination on the near side of the moon.
The main payloads on the spacecraft were from NASA, part of an effort to do experiments on the moon at lower cost using commercial companies. Astrobotic’s launch was the first in the program, known as Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS. NASA paid Astrobotic $108 million to transport five experiments that cost $9 million to build.
Peregrine launched flawlessly on January 8 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the first flight of a brand new rocket known as Vulcan. But soon after it separated from the rocket’s second stage, its propulsion system suffered a severe malfunction and the spacecraft could not keep its solar panels pointed at the sun.
Astrobotic engineers were able to reorient Peregrine so that its battery could be recharged. But the propellant leak made the planned moon landing impossible. The company’s current hypothesis is that a valve failed to close, causing a high-pressure helium flow to rupture a propellant tank.
Astrobotic initially estimated that Peregrine would run out of propellant and die within days. But as the leak slowed, the spacecraft continued to operate. All 10 payloads, including four from NASA, fired successfully, proving the spacecraft’s power systems were working. (NASA’s fifth payload, a laser reflector, required no power.) Other customer payloads, including a small rover built by students at Carnegie Mellon University and experiments for the German and Mexican space agencies, were also powered up.
“After that anomaly, we just had win after win showing that the spacecraft was working in space,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said during Friday’s press conference.
Over the weekend, the company said the spacecraft, thrown off course by a propellant leak, was on track to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The company said it decided to leave Peregrine in this orbit to prevent the possibility of the disabled spacecraft colliding with satellites around Earth.
More probes aim for the moon.
On Friday, a robotic Japanese lunar-orbiting spacecraft, SLIM, successfully landed on the moon, albeit without power due to problems with its solar array.
The next NASA-sponsored commercial mission, from Intuitive Machines of Houston, could launch in mid-February.
Astrobotic has a contract with NASA to carry a much larger payload to the moon: the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER. VIPER is driving around the moon’s south polar region, including entering permanently shadowed craters that are some of the coldest places in the solar system. This mission is to gather basic scientific reconnaissance before the astronauts head there.
While the cost of NASA’s Peregrine experiments was $9 million, VIPER will cost more than $430 million to build and operate, and to ride aboard Astrobotic’s largest lander, Griffin.
The VIPER mission is currently scheduled to launch in November, but that would mean NASA would have to fly a basic, expensive vehicle on an unproven spacecraft from a company that hasn’t successfully landed on the moon yet.
Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science directorate, said during Friday’s news conference that he wanted to see the results of the investigation into what went wrong with Peregrine before deciding whether to make changes to its contract. with Astrobotic for the delivery of OHIA.
“We want to make sure we really understand the root cause and the factors that contributed to what happened at Peregrine,” Dr Kearns said, “and whether we need to modify our plans for Griffin.”