Over the next few years, NASA will be busy with the moon.
The giant rocket lofts the capsule with no astronauts around the moon, probably before the end of summer. The robot lander parade will stop experiments on the Moon, especially to collect a series of scientific data on water ice trapped in the polar regions. A few years from now, astronauts will be back there for more than half a century after the last Apollo lunar landing.
All of these are part of NASA’s 21st Century Moon program, named after Artemis, Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology.
Early on Monday, a spacecraft named CAPSTONE will be launched as the first Artemis to the Moon. It’s modest in size and range compared to what you should follow.
There are no astronauts in CAPSTONE. The spacecraft is too small and is about the size of a microwave oven. This robot probe does not even land on the moon.
But it differs from previous lunar missions in many ways. This could serve as a template for public-private partnerships that NASA can undertake in the future to gain better value on interplanetary voyages.
Bradley Cheetham, CEO and President of Advanced Space, which manages NASA’s mission, said:
Launch coverage NASA Television will start at 5am EST on Monday. The rocket needs to be launched at the exact moment at 5:50 am for the spacecraft to be lofted into the correct orbit.
The official name of the mission is Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. It acts as a lunar orbit scout, and eventually a manned space station will be built as part of Artemis. Its outpost, named Gateway, acts as a way station to stop future crew members before they reach the surface of the moon.
CAPSTONE is unusual for NASA in several ways. For one thing, it sits on a New Zealand lunch pad instead of Florida. Second, NASA has not designed or built CAPSTONE and has not operated it. The agency does not own it. CAPSTONE belongs to Advanced Space, which has 45 employees in the suburbs of Denver.
The spacecraft will follow a slow but efficient orbit to the Moon, arriving on November 13. If the rocket misses the moment of launch due to weather or technical issues, there is an additional chance until July 27th. By then it will land on the ground and still be in orbit of the moon on the same day of November 13.
CAPSTONE’s mission continues to expect NASA to collaborate with private companies in new ways to acquire additional features faster and at lower cost.
Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said:
The Advance Space deal with NASA for CAPSTONE, signed in 2019, cost $ 20 million. The ride on CAPSTONE into space is also small and inexpensive. Launched by Rocket Lab, a US and New Zealand company that is a leader in delivering small payloads in orbit, it costs just under $ 10 million.
Christopher Baker, NASA’s Program Executive for Small Spacecraft Technology, said: “Relatively fast and relatively low cost.”
“I see this as a pathfinder of how we can help promote cross-earth commercial missions,” Baker said.
According to Dr. Chisam, CAPSTONE’s main mission is to last six months and could take another year.
The data it collects assists planners of the lunar outpost known as the gateway.
When President Donald J. Trump declared in 2017 that his administration’s top priority in space policy was to send astronauts back to the moon, NASA’s buzzword was “reusable” and “sustainable.” It was possible. “
As a result, NASA has made space stations around the Moon an important part of how astronauts reach the surface of the Moon. Such staging sites will make it easier for them to reach different parts of the moon.
The first Artemis landing mission, currently scheduled for 2025, but likely to be postponed, will not use the gateway. But subsequent missions will be.
NASA has determined that the best place to place this outpost is known as the near-straight halo orbit.
A halo orbit is an orbit that is affected by the gravity of two objects (in this case the earth and the moon). The effects of the two objects make the orbit very stable and minimize the amount of propellant required for the spacecraft to orbit the moon.
The gravitational interaction also keeps the orbit at an angle of about 90 degrees to the line of sight from the earth. (This is an almost linear part of the name.) Therefore, spacecraft in this orbit will not pass behind the moon, where communication is cut off.
The gateway’s orbit is within approximately 2,200 miles from the Moon’s North Pole and loops out to a distance of 44,000 miles beyond the South Pole. It takes about a week to go around the moon.
From the point of view of the underlying mathematics, exotic orbits such as the almost linear halo orbit are well understood. But this is also the orbit that the spacecraft has never been to.
Therefore, CAPSTONE.
Dan Hartman, Program Manager at Gateway, said: “But you can use this particular CAPSTONE payload to help validate your model.”
In fact, if there are no Global Positioning System satellites around the moon to pinpoint the exact location, trial and error will be required to find the best way to keep the spacecraft in the desired orbit. There may be cases.
“The greatest uncertainty is knowing where you really are,” said Dr. Chisam. “When you’re in space, you don’t really know where you are, so you can always estimate where it is, but there’s some uncertainty around it.”
Like other NASA missions, CAPSTONE used signals from NASA’s radio satellite antennas from the Deep Space Network to triangulate estimates of its location and, if necessary, pass the farthest point from the moon. Immediately after, it returns to the desired trajectory.
CAPSTONE also tests another way to find its location. Few people will spend time and money building a GPS network around the moon. However, other spacecraft, including NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, are orbiting the Moon, and more spacecraft may arrive in the coming years. By communicating with each other, a fleet of spacecraft in different orbits can essentially set up ad hoc GPS.
Advanced Space has been developing this technology for over 7 years, and CAPSTONE tests the concept by signaling with the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. “Over time, we will be able to determine where both spacecraft are,” said Dr. Chisam.
When Advanced Space began developing CAPSTONE, it also decided to add a computer chip-scale atomic clock to the spacecraft and compare its time to what was broadcast from Earth. The data also helps to locate the spacecraft.
Since Advanced Space owns CAPSTONE, it has the flexibility to make changes without NASA’s permission. Agencies are still working closely on such projects, but this flexibility could benefit both private citizens like Advanced Space and NASA.
“Because we had a commercial contract with a vendor, we didn’t have to do a large review of government contractors if we needed to change anything,” said Dr. Chisam. “It helped in terms of speed.”
Conversely, Advanced Space was unable to request additional money from NASA as it was negotiating a fixed fee for the mission (although it received additional payments due to a supply chain delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I did). A traditional NASA contract called “Cost Plus” reimburses the amount spent by a company and then adds the fees received as profits on top of it. It provides little incentive to manage costs.
“When things happened, we had to come up with ways to deal with them very efficiently,” said Dr. Chisam.
This is NASA’s successful strategy of using a fixed-price contract with SpaceX from Elon Musk, which transports cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station at a much lower cost than NASA’s former Space Shuttle. Similar to. In the case of SpaceX, NASA’s investment has allowed non-NASA customers and civilian astronauts interested in payload launches to go into orbit.
Until CAPSTONE, Advanced Space’s work was mostly theoretical, orbit analysis and software creation for ad hoc GPS, not spacecraft construction and operation.
The company does not actually have a spacecraft manufacturing business yet. “We bought a spacecraft,” said Dr. Chisam. “I’m telling people that Lego is the only hardware we build here in Advanced. We have a great collection of Lego.”
Over the last few decades, the proliferation of small satellites called CubeSats has allowed more companies to quickly build spacecraft based on a standardized design with a cube size of 10 centimeters (4 inches). It came to be. While CAPSTONE is the largest and has a volume of 12 cubes, Advanced Space could be purchased almost off-the-shelf from Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems in Irvine, CA.
Still, many problems needed to be resolved. For example, most CubeSats are in low earth orbit, just a few hundred miles above the surface. The moon is about 250,000 miles away.
“No one flew the CubeSat on the moon,” said Dr. Chisam. “So it makes sense that no one made a radio to fly the CubeSat on the moon, so I actually jumped in to understand many of these details and actually collaborated with a few different people. I had to build a working system. “
Gateway Program Manager Hartman is excited about CAPSTONE, but says it is not essential to move the lunar outpost forward. NASA has already signed a contract to build the first two modules of the gateway. The European Space Agency also offers two modules.
“Can you fly without it?” Hartman said of CAPSTONE. “Yes. Mandatory? No.”
But he added, “Whenever you can reduce the error bars in your model, it’s always good.”
Dr. Chee Sam is thinking about what will happen next, perhaps more missions to the Moon, for either NASA or any other commercial partner. He is also thinking further.
“I’m very interested in how to do something similar to Mars,” he said. “I’m actually quite interested in Venus. I don’t think it’s getting enough attention.”
