A shoebox-sized satellite may soon face its untimely death after failing to launch its thrusters. cubes It may have been hacked excessively I am waiting to launch aboard a NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket prior to last year’s Artemis 1 mission.
Engineers have been working to try and Rescue of the LunaH-Map cubesat mission, hoping to engage its propulsion system and give it a second chance to enter lunar orbit. However, it may be too late for the small satellite, as the team behind the mission may end operations at the end of this month.
Speaking at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference Monday, Craig Hardgrove, the mission’s principal investigator at Arizona State University, revealed that the team will officially cancel the mission before. End of May if they can’t ignite Cubesat’s propulsion system, SpaceNews a reportMr. Dr.
The team is trying to free a valve stuck inside the system, which could be preventing batches of cubes from firing. “At some point, the valves may blow, which can be very good or very bad,” said Hardgrove. “It’s really all we have left to try at this point.”
LunaH-Map, short for Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, is designed to orbit the moon and explore possible reservoirs of water ice beneath its surface. NASA launched Satellites on November 16, 2022, along with nine other cubes, as secondary payloads aboard the Artemis 1 mission. Luna-H One of six transmitting-capable Artemis Cubes Confirmation signals On the ground, the other four remained silent and were never heard from again.
Hardgrove blamed the Artemis 1 mission’s multiple delays on Cubesat’s Unfortunate fate. The cubes were placed inside the NASA Space Launch Systemocket in mid-2021, and mission teams had no way of accessing their payloads until launch. “We have advised NASA that this propulsion system was not built to withstand a long launch delay, longer than four or five months,” Hardgrove said, according to SpaceNews. “If we don’t have to wait more than a year, I think we’ll at least have a chance of doing our full science mission.”
Luna-H Map’s thrusters use iodine as a propellant, which Hardgrove suspects was vaporized during the cubes’ long wait inside the rocket. As a result, the satellite failed to fire its thrusters, preventing it from performing its intended flyby of the moon on November 21, 2022. Data collected by mission engineers indicates that a valve inside the spacecraft’s thrusters is partially stuck, and that they are trying to use geysers in the thrust system to release led.
The team still has two weeks to try and free the troublesome valve in the hopes that the small satellite can do some science in orbit.
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