Astrobotic remains optimistic about its Peregrine lunar lander despite the failure of the probe's debut mission.
Peregine launched the maiden flight of United Launch Alliance's (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket on January 8. While the launch went smoothly, Peregrine suffered a propulsion anomaly just hours into its mission, causing a significant propellant leak. It quickly became clear that Peregrine would not reach the moon and would fall back to Earth, and the lander eventually re-entered the atmosphere and broke up over the Pacific Ocean on Thursday (Jan. 18). Astrobotic kept the public informed throughout the mission, posting updates several times a day on how the bumped Peregrine lander was faring.
Despite the premature completion of the mission, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton is proud of how Peregrine performed. "I know it's very easy to focus on the failure and the one thing that failed on the spacecraft, and we'll all dream about that for a long time," Thornton said during a media teleconference on Friday (Jan. 19).
"But there's a lot that worked," Thornton continued. "And that's something I'm very proud of. That Astrobotic designed and built hardware, like avionics, software and system architectures and other parts of the spacecraft - they all worked."
Related: Astrobotic loses contact with the bumped Peregrine lunar lander
Thornton elaborated on the anomaly that caused Peregrine's demise, describing how a valve that separated the helium and oxidizer in the lander's propulsion system failed to properly reseal. This problem allowed a stream of helium to enter the oxidation tank, causing the pressure to become so high that the tank ruptured.
When the Astrobotic team realized what had happened, emotions immediately dropped at mission control, Thornton said. Still, the anomaly led Astrobotic's flight engineers to some incredible moments of ingenuity as they improvised maneuvers to point the spacecraft's solar panels toward the sun and even managed to take a photo of Earth.
Thornton described how, to take the photo, Astrobotic mission controllers had to rotate the spacecraft so that a mount blocked the sun from the camera lens, compared to using one finger to block the sun from the field of view.
"That was a big emotional moment," Thornton said. "Because I think it represented the best of Astrobotic."
Thornton added that mission controllers could also use the doomed lander's propellant leak to help them return the craft safely over the Pacific Ocean. "And the last maneuver was very clever, because they had characterized the leak at that point and found that if we could turn the spacecraft, we could actually use the leak to our advantage as a continuous little propulsive maneuver that could push us." further into the ocean."
The decision to place Peregrine on a trajectory to return across the ocean was not taken lightly. Thornton said the company weighed the benefits of trying to stay on track with the lander, but ultimately it proved too risky and had the potential to create dangerous space debris.
"Theoretically, we might have been able to travel around the Earth and possibly get back to the moon. At that point, it would have been anyone's guess what could have happened next," Thornton said during the conference call. "Maybe we could have had an impact. Maybe we had missed the moon. Maybe we might have had enough fuel to get into lunar orbit.
"It's really the hypothetical world. At that point, we just don't really know what would have happened next."
Some Peregrine shipments also performed excellently despite not reaching their final destination. A radiation detector built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) was able to collect 92 hours of data related to the radiation environment in cislunar space, and two NASA-built instruments, the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) and the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer ( LETS). ), were also able to measure this radiation during Peregrine's flight.
But many of the payloads were completely unable to carry out their intended use, such as the multiple lunar rovers on board or the controversial memorial payloads containing human remains. Dan Hendrickson, Astrobotic's vice president of business development, thanked the payload teams for their support during the mission and underlined that customers "knew all the challenges and risks of the lunar mission and how difficult it really is" to land a spacecraft on the moon. to make. .
"When they came to the table, they implicitly understood that, but we weren't taking any risks. And we outlined and explained all those challenges and risks as they existed," Hendrickson said. "And to their credit, they still signed up."
Peregrine was the first mission contracted by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to accelerate lunar science by partnering with private companies such as Astrobotic to put scientific experiments on the moon.
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Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, added that "failure is often part of the path to success" and that the agency remains committed to CLPS despite Peregrine's fate. 'We embrace a risk attitude [in which] new companies will innovate, push the boundaries, and we will all learn and grow from every flight," Kearns said during today's briefing.
The next CLPS-contracted mission will launch soon: The Nova-C lander, built by Houston company Intuitive Machines, is expected to launch toward the moon atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-February.
