The first phase of Artemis’ mission to conquer the Moon starts in the worst possible way

Surely the mission of Artemis is familiar to you. If you want a detailed explanation, you just have to click here, and if you want a summary, this is what we tell you in the paragraph above: NASA’s new goal is to populate the Moon with a permanent base.

This mission won’t start for a few years although the first steps have just been taken with the launch of the CAPSTONE space probe on June 28th.

The purpose of this mission was to confirm the stability of the complex 3D Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) to be used for the Gateway Space Station.scheduled for release in November 2024.

Also, NASA lost radio contact with CAPSTONE (which stands for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment).

According to NASA, the loss of communication occurred on July 4, 2022.while CAPSTONE communicated with the space agency’s Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking and communications system designed to support deep space missions.

The outage occurred after the spacecraft separated from the Rocket Lab Photon upper stage.which suffered seven engine failures in six days, sending a robotic probe from low Earth orbit on a four-month ballistic trajectory into circumlunar space.

In a press release NASA has stated that DSN has good trajectory data for CAPSTONE and that the spacecraft has sufficient fuel on board. to allow him to delay the necessary post-separation burn for a few days while NASA engineers try to identify the problem and restore radio communications.

NRHO does not focus on any celestial body, but at a point in space where the gravitational forces of the moon and earth balance.

So far, it has only been evaluated in computer simulations, but if tests confirm its stability, This will allow Gateway to act as an outpost for missions to the Moon and Mars.