Spaceship traveling to the Moon records anomaly, says company – 01/08/2024 – Science

The first United States lunar landing module launched into space in more than five decades registered an anomaly that prevents it from pointing its solar panels towards the Sun. The announcement was made this Monday (8) by Astrobotic, which built the device.

“The team responds in real time as the situation progresses and will provide updates as data is obtained and analyzed,” the company said on its X social network account.

The announcement comes just hours after launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The PM1 (Peregrine Mission 1) module was transported by the Vulcan Centaur, a rocket that makes its debut and was developed by ULA (United Launch Alliance), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The team that coordinated the launch celebrated when the lunar module safely separated from the rocket about 48 minutes later, an important milestone for the private company.

The president and executive director of ULA, Tony Bruno, praised the operation in a live broadcast carried out by NASA.

“I’m very excited (…) it’s been years of hard work,” said Bruno. “So far it’s been a beautiful mission to return to the Moon”, he celebrated.

Taking the United States back to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo is “a transcendent honor,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic.

Until now, a soft landing on Earth’s natural satellite has only been achieved by a few national space agencies: the Soviet Union was the first, in 1966, followed by the USA, which remains the only country to have landed humans on the Moon.

China has successfully touched the surface three times in the last decade, while India was the most recent to achieve the feat on its second attempt last year.

The United States turns to the private sector in an effort to stimulate a broader lunar economy and deploy its own spacecraft at low cost under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.