HOUSTON — Two spacecraft, one from a startup and the other built by a major aerospace company, are experiencing problems after their launch as rideshares on a lunar lander mission.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft was one of three rideshare payloads on the Falcon 9 launch of the IM-2 lunar lander for Intuitive Machines Feb. 26. Those payloads deployed from the Falcon 9 upper stage several minutes after IM-2 was released.
NASA said in a statement about four hours after launch that Lunar Trailblazer had powered up and started transmitting as planned. However, in a subsequent statement late Feb. 27, NASA said that communications with the spacecraft had been lost at about 7:30 a.m. Eastern that day, or roughly 12 hours after launch.
That loss of communications came after telemetry indicated “intermittent power system issues” with the spacecraft. Contact was restored several hours later and NASA said controllers were working “to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions.”
Lockheed Martin provided the smallsat bus used for Lunar Trailblazer, a 200-kilogram spacecraft that is part of a NASA line of small planetary spacecraft missions called SIMPLEx. The mission is led by Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The spacecraft is on a low-energy trajectory to the moon that incudes two trajectory correction maneuvers before a lunar flyby March 3. The spacecraft will make a second lunar flyby May 8 before going into orbit around the moon July 7.
Lunar Trailblazer is designed to operate in a low lunar orbit, carrying instruments to map the amount and form of water on the moon. Once in orbit, the spacecraft has a two-year prime mission.
A second spacecraft launched on the IM-2 mission is Odin, built by asteroid mining startup AstroForge to fly by an asteroid and determine if it is metallic. The company has had difficulties communicating with the spacecraft since deployment, though.
Matt Gialich, chief executive of AstroForge, said in a video update early Feb. 28 that they are getting carrier signals from Odin but no telemetry yet. That leads them to believe that the spacecraft is at least in a power-positive mode, but they lack the telemetry to confirm that. “There’s no known way to actually to have vehicle communicating with us at this point in the mission and not be in a power-positive state,” he said.
One scenario he offered involved problems with its ground network. That included a hardware malfunction at one station and interference at another, as well as the possibility of a configuration issue of some kind across the company’s network that is preventing it from receiving telemetry.
To address that, the company planned to send up commands early Feb. 28 to turn on a power amplifier for the spacecraft’s transmitter, taking two approaches in case there is an issue with the spacecraft’s flight computer. The goal is “getting more data from the spacecraft so we can make sure its state is in a good place,” Gialich said.
A second scenario, he said, is that Odin is in a “really slow, uncontrolled tumble” affecting communications. However, he said the company has recent information that indicated that tumble was unlikely.
Gialich said the spacecraft was on course and would, without intervention from the ground, perform a “contingency burn” six and a half days after launch to target its asteroid destination, 2022 OB5. However, if there are even slight errors in the spacecraft’s position when compared to predictions, he said it will be very hard to track the spacecraft with high-gain antennas.
The third rideshare spacecraft on the launch, the Chimera orbital transfer vehicle by Epic Aerospace, was “healthy and power positive,” the company said in an update a few hours after launch.
The IM-2 lander itself is in “excellent health,” Intuitive Machines said in a statement Feb. 27. It will perform several trajectory correction maneuvers before arriving at the moon, entering orbit ahead of a landing on March 6.
