At the Moon! CAPSTONE successfully enters orbit to support NASA's Artemis Program

The CAPSTONE CubeSat has successfully entered the lunar orbit, ending its five-month-long journey to the Moon. NASA announced that the mission teams carried out an initial orbit insertion maneuver by firing the spacecraft’s thrusters to place it into orbit at 6:09 am IST on November 15. 

The orbit CAPSTONE has been installed in a highly elliptical path called the Non-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) where it will test its gravitational stability. Designed to last six months, the CubeSat will support NASA’s Artemis Program, which involves building the Lunar Gateway (a space station) in the same orbit around the Moon. 

“In the next five days, CAPSTONE will perform two additional clean-up maneuvers to refine its orbit. After these maneuvers, the team will review data to confirm that CAPSTONE remains on track in the NRHO,” an official statement by NASA read. The agency says that CAPSTONE, short for Cis-lunar Autonomous Positioning Systems Operations and Navigation Experiment, is the first satellite to fly in the NRHO and the first CubeSat to operate around the Moon. 

More about CAPSTONE

The CAPSTONE CubeSat has been developed by Terran Orbital and is managed by Advanced Space with support from NASA. About the size of a microwave oven, the mission cost roughly $30 million, including the launch services offered by Rocket Lab. 

The CubeSat was launched on June 28 this year aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle; the journey, however, was filled with serious bumps. The spacecraft suffered several glitches, the first of which occurred on July 4. This is when the mission controllers lost contact with the spacecraft but it was fixed soon. 

The next glitch occurred two months later due to a faulty valve in CAPSTONE’s propulsion system that sent it tumbling into space and subsequently into safe mode. This problem too was fixed soon and the CubeSat is now ready to begin its six-month-long mission to test the NRHO. It will find out if the NRHO is stable and fuel-efficient for the Gateway. NASA has plans to launch the first components of the Gateway under the Artemis Program starting in 2024. CAPSTONE will also test a new navigation technology, that would offer spacecraft-to-spacecraft connection without relying on ground-based stations.