NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer probe, sent to the Moon yesterday, lost contact with Earth 12 hours after launch. A few hours later, the mission team re-established contact, but still can’t receive telemetry from the craft. And that’s not all the alarming news.
An artist’s rendering of the Lunar Trailblazer probe. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin
On February 27, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent two vehicles to the Moon: the Athena lander from Intuitive Machines and the orbital Lunar Trailblazer from NASA. The Athena module is still in good shape, and no unforeseen situations have occurred with it. At first, everything was fine with the NASA Lunar Trailblazer probe, until mission operators began to notice problems with the power supply on board the vehicle. Soon after, communication with the probe was lost and was restored only a few hours later.
At the time of publication of the information on the probe’s status, the mission team was still unable to receive its telemetry and was unable to control the apparatus’s equipment. Only after the onboard data reception is resumed will it be possible to talk about developing a plan to exit the crisis. Otherwise, the agency will lose this spacecraft.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer is essential to the mission to return humans to the Moon. It is a 3.5-meter-long, 200-kilogram craft that will enter low lunar orbit to collect data on the possible presence of water on the Moon, either in minerals or as water ice. Water will be needed to support human life on the moon and, if there is enough of it, to produce rocket fuel on site.
Lunar Trailblazer was built by Lockheed Martin and is equipped with two sophisticated instruments that will help it search for traces of water on the Moon. One of them, the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM), is designed to measure the temperature of the Moon’s surface using infrared radiation, which can help determine the distribution of minerals.
Another instrument on board the probe, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is designed to measure the amount of sunlight reflecting off the moon’s surface to help search for chemical “fingerprints” of any water lurking on the surface.
Along with the NASA and Intuitive Machines lunar landers, two other small probes were launched with missions unrelated to lunar exploration. One of them, AstroForge’s Odin, was supposed to explore asteroid 2022 OB5. AstroForge plans to land on the asteroid in the future to search for useful resources to mine in space. However, Odin never made contact after its launch. The mission team “doesn’t fully understand the state of the craft.”