Mission to the Moon fails after fuel leak – 01/09/2024 – Science

The Peregrine module, which could make the first landing by a private company on the Moon, no longer has a chance of landing. The reason is a fuel leak, Astrobotic announced this Tuesday (9).

There was also enough propellant for approximately 40 hours of flight, and engineers were looking for ways to extend the probe’s operational life. The company added that it continued to receive data that can be used in the next mission.

The news came the day after the launch of the module on a Vulcan Centaur rocket, in Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA). This was the first flight of the rocket, developed by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The first problems appeared on Monday (8), when Peregrine separated from the launcher’s second stage and began its autonomous flight.

The probe’s propulsion systems activated, but the spacecraft was unable to stably point its photovoltaic panels toward the Sun.

The batteries quickly lost their charge. It was possible, however, to establish communication between the probe and controllers at Astrobotic’s headquarters in Pittsburgh, which allowed engineers to make an impromptu maneuver to direct the panels.

After a period of scheduled communications blackout, controllers determined that the maneuver was successful and the batteries were recharging. But, at 3:03 pm on Monday (Brasília time), the company announced that the fault detected in the propulsion system was causing a critical fuel leak.

The leak continued this Tuesday and, in the first statement of the day, the company said that the objective was to bring the probe as close as possible to the Moon.

In the afternoon, Astrobotic declared that the plan to take the spacecraft to the lunar surface has come to an end. “Unfortunately, due to the propellant leak, there is no longer a chance of a Moon landing.”

The module left Earth with 21 payloads, six of which were from NASA. Among them were a series of equipment, such as spectrometers, sensors and minirobots.

There were also loads without purely scientific objectives, such as a time capsule with messages from more than 80 thousand children and a plaque in memory of humanity on the Moon.

The probe also carried the ashes of at least 69 people, including Gene Roddenberry, creator of “Star Trek”, and the series’ actresses Majel Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols.

Due to the presence of ash, indigenous people in the United States classified the mission as a “desecration” of the Moon, a sacred star in their culture.

In recent years, private missions from Israel and Japan, as well as a recent attempt by the Russian space agency, have failed to land on the Moon.

Until now, only national space agencies have managed to perform a soft landing on Earth’s natural satellite: the Soviet Union was the first, in 1966, followed by the United States, which remains the only country to have taken humans to the Moon.

China has successfully touched the surface of the natural satellite on three occasions in the last decade, and India was the most recent, achieving the feat on its second attempt last year.