NASA has not yet renounced Lunar Trailblazer.
The 440 pound probe (200 kilograms) was silent one day after its launch on February 26 on a Spacex Falcon 9. Shortly after takeoff, the mission team determined that Lunar Trailblazer was turning slowly and running under power, since it could not be oriented to harvest enough sunlight to load its batteries as planned.
More than two months have passed since a fairly serious evaluation, but NASA is still working to relive the orbiter, and keep the DOE for another six weeks.
“Mission equipment modeling indicates that lighting conditions from May to mid -June are favorable to provide sufficient sunlight on the solar panels of the spaceship to recharge the batteries at an operational and potential level” (April 30).
“The mission equipment has determined that, if the ability to order the spacecraft can be restored, the propulsion system is defrosted and the instruments are operable, it is possible to return the spacecraft to an elliptical lunar and complete its” “tea and complete itte”.
The mission team knows the accurate position of Trailblazer Lunar thanks to land monitoring, NASA officials said the update. If the contact is successful restored, the agency will have a “continuation/termination review” to determine if the probe can really with its mission.
“If a signal is not withdrawn at the end of the period, howling, NASA will begin to move to close the mission,” says the update.
The trailblazer lunar mission of $ 94 million aims to map the moon water stores from the lunar orbit, collecting information that could help the future creed exploration of the nearest neighbor on earth. And that is a key objective of NASA: through its Artemis program, the agency is working to establish one or more bases of the South Pole nearby, which must be rich in water of water.
Lunar Trailblazer was launched with another spacecraft that was designed to help NASA’s moon efforts: Athena, the second moon of the Houston Company Moon intuitive machines.
But things did not come out as planned for Athena; The Lander collapsed shortly after playing near the South Pole of the Moon on March 6, bringing a premature end to its 10 -day scheduled mission.
