The loss of communications occurred on July 4, 2022, according to NASA. The outage occurred after the spacecraft separated from the Rocket Lab Photon upper stage.
In an updated press release, NASA said they had good data on CAPSTONE’s trajectory and that the spacecraft had enough propellant on board to delay the operation by several days while NASA engineers tried to locate the problem and re-establish radio contact.
Launched on June 28 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, the 25kg CAPSTONE satellite is on a nine-month mission to verify the stability of the complex 3D near-rectangular halo orbit (NRHO) that will be used for the Gateway space station. It is scheduled to be released in November 2024.
Source: Ferra
