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NASA is finally giving up on its tiny water-hunting cubesat, officially calling it quits on the Lunar Flashlight mission after failing to fix its propulsion issues.Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewOn Friday, the space agency announced the end of its Lunar Flashlight mission “because the CubeSat cannot complete maneuvers to stay in the Earth-Moon system,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a statement. “It’s disappointing for the science team, and for the whole Lunar…

For nearly five months, teams behind NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission have been trying to get the briefcase-sized satellite to fire up its thrusters and get on the right orbital track around the Moon. There’s now some hope with one of the thrusters showing some improvement as work continues on the remaining three. Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewThe Lunar Flashlight’s operations team has developed a new method to get the satellite’s propulsion system up and running, with the…

NASA engineers are struggling to get a lunar probe on the right track and have until the end of April to fix the spacecraft’s thrusters so that it is able to fly over the Moon’s South Pole.On Thursday, NASA provided the latest update on its Lunar Flashlight cubesat, which launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket alongside Japan’s Hakuto-R lunar lander mission in December 2022. Shortly after launch, the spacecraft ran into some trouble when three of its four thrusters were underperforming on account of obstructed fuel lines. The…

An artist’s impression of Lunar Flashlight scanning a permanently shadowed region on the Moon. Illustration: NASA/JPL-CaltechNASA’s Lunar Flashlight is on a mission to hunt for water ice on the Moon’s surface, but the mission appears to be in trouble as three of the craft’s four thrusters are “underperforming,” according to NASA.The Lunar Flashlight team is in the midst of evaluating the three problematic thrusters as the spacecraft journeys toward the Moon, NASA said in a press release. Lunar Flashlightlaunched…

The cubesat is designed to use a miniaturized neutron spectrometer to count epithermal neutrons and map water abundance in the south polar region of the Moon.Illustration: NASAThe inaugural launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) sent the Orion capsule on a historic mission to the Moon and back, but the rocket’s secondary payloads have been faltering. NASA’s Luna-H Map cubesat launched aboard SLS on November 16 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, along with 9 other miniature satellites as secondary payloads. The…

The Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) mission is designed to use a solar sail to fly by an asteroid and gather images. Illustration: NASAJapan’s tiny lunar lander never got to touch down on the Moon, as it failed to communicate with ground controllers shortly after launching aboard NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The spacecraft was one of 10 cubesats that participated in the Artemis 1 launch, which endured several delays that may have affected the cubesats’ performance in space. On Monday, the Japanese space…

The Artemis 1 mission taking off from the Kennedy Space Center early Wednesday morning. Photo: NASAThe launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission sent the Orion capsule on a journey to the Moon, in addition to 10 cubesats included as secondary payloads. The Space Launch System’s upper stage successfully deployed the tiny satellites yesterday, but one of them appears to be malfunctioning. The jumbo Moon rocket took off on Wednesday at at 1:47 a.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, officially kickstarting NASA’s Artemis…