NASA\u2019s recent mission to send payloads on Astrobotic\u2019s Peregrine lunar lander, launched in January on United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan Centaur, faced a setback when a propellant leak prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing. Despite this, valuable data was still collected from the mission.<\/p>\n
According to Dan Hendrickson, vice president of Astrobotic, many of the payloads were tested during the flight, even though the spacecraft did not reach the moon. \u201cIn transit, we were going to keep most of those payloads in a survival mode,\u201d Hendrickson explained during a session at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference. \u201cBut as our mission deviated, the plan deviated as well, much to the benefit of all the payloads.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the instruments, the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS), was able to collect data about the cislunar radiation environment instead of on the lunar surface as intended. Stuart George of NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center noted, \u201cThe instrument worked perfectly the whole time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, the Peregrine Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS) detected traces of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide from the lander\u2019s oxidizer leak. Barbara Cohen, principal investigator for PITMS at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, stated, \u201cThat transient atmosphere, if you will, of the oxidizer around the spacecraft, that self-induced environment, persisted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even non-NASA payloads, like the Iris lunar rover built by students at Carnegie Mellon University, were able to test their subsystems and confirm functionality. \u201cEverything that we were allowed to test worked,\u201d said Raewyn Duvall, program manager for Iris.<\/p>\n
Astrobotic is currently investigating the propellant leak to determine any necessary changes for their larger Griffin lander, which will launch NASA\u2019s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission. NASA will determine future actions based on the results of this investigation, including potential changes for VIPER.<\/p>\n
Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, indicated that the Griffin and VIPER launch, originally planned for this November, is likely to be delayed. \u201cIt is extremely unlikely they will fly before the end of this year,\u201d Kearns stated, due to the Peregrine investigation and other preparations.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA\u2019s recent mission to send payloads on Astrobotic\u2019s Peregrine lunar lander, launched in January on United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan Centaur, faced a setback when a propellant leak prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing. Despite this, valuable data was still collected from the mission. According to Dan Hendrickson, vice president of Astrobotic, many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[697,137,625],"class_list":["post-20036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-astrobotic","tag-lunar","tag-moon"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20036"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}