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A tiny asteroid explorer that launched on NASA's moon mission last week still hasn't phoned home. Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout was one of 10 cubesats that hitched a ride to space on NASA's Artemis 1 mission, which launched on Nov. 16. The spacecraft was designed to sail on sunlight to fly past a small asteroid dubbed 2020 GE about a year from now. NEA Scout personnel are hoping that the spacecraft's unusual propulsion strategy could help them track down the cubesat. Packed into the small satellite was a reflective, silvery solar sail that unfolds to 924 square feet (86 square...

NASA’s Artemis program took an important step forward this weekend, with CAPSTONE finally reaching its destination—a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. The 55-pound cubesat will now test this promising orbit in preparation for the Gateway lunar space station. CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, reached NRHO on Sunday, November 13, according to an Advanced Space press release. Later this week, the $33 million cubesat will attempt a pair of tiny clean-up maneuvers to confirm its placement in the lunar orbit. In addition to being the first human-built device to operate in NRHO,...

The CAPSTONE team is working to understand the problem and how to fix it. CAPSTONE in its halo-shaped lunar orbit. Artist's illustration of NASA's tiny CAPSTONE probe in its halo-shaped lunar orbit. CAPSTONE is scheduled to arrive at the moon on Nov. 13, 2022, but that future is in doubt; mission team members lost contact with the cubesat shortly after it began flying freely on July 4. (Image credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter) CAPSTONE has gone dark. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) NASA probe ceased communicating with its handlers yesterday (July 4), shortly after it deployed successfully from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus...

As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface. Take water, for instance: Because it's a heavy and therefore expensive resource to launch from Earth, our future explorers might have to seek out ice to mine. Once excavated, it can be melted and purified for drinking and used for rocket fuel. But how much water is there on the Moon, and where might we find it? This is where NASA's Lunar Flashlight comes in. About the size of a briefcase, the small satellite —...

Mayak, Russian for ‘Lighthouse or Beacon,’ is a crowd-funded 3U CubeSat developed by a group called ‘Your Sector of Space’ with support from the Moscow State University of Mechanical Engineering to create an experimental mission for establishing an artificial star – the brightest object in the night sky aside from the Moon. Mayak is expected to deploy four triangular reflectors, each with a surface of 4m², forming a large tetrahedral reflector with a reflection coefficient of 95%. Based on pre-flight analysis, Mayak will reach an optical magnitude of -10 at the beginning of the flight – surpassing the brightness of...