NASA calls time on CAPSTONE after four years of lunar orbit lessons
Advanced Space's privately owned probe will keep flying, but the agency's role is over
After four years of operations around the Moon, NASA's CAPSTONE mission has bitten the lunar dust, in a manner of speaking.
The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched in 2022, with a primary mission to validate the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) intended for NASA's "paused" Gateway space station.
Launched in June 2022 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, CAPSTONE had a troubled start to life, briefly giving controllers the silent treatment before slipping into lunar orbit in November 2022.
The diminutive spacecraft was the first US commercial mission to orbit the Moon and spent an initial six months checking out the NRHO planned for the Gateway before its mission was extended and the spacecraft became, according to NASA, "a testbed for advanced communications, networking, autonomous navigation, and software-defined satellite...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE
