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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...

One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday, May 17. A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1. On May 12, engineers received a full memory readout from the flight data system computer, which formats the data to send back to Earth. They isolated the one bit in the memory that had changed, and they recreated the effect on a computer at JPL. They found the...

DARMSTADT, Germany - A European space probe landed safely on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan on Friday, a space official said, buoying hopes the mission would produce data that could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Officials were jubilant as early signals showed the probe powering up for entry, then beginning the 2 1/2-hour parachute descent during which it was to gather information that could shed light on how life arose on Earth. Mission controllers were confident the Huygens probe made a soft landing because it was still transmitting steadily long after it should have landed,...