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Monday, January 8, 2024

It's Looking Bad for Astrobotic's Peregrine Lander

This morning's launch of the Vulcan Centaur Cert-1 mission went flawlessly by what observers could see, and after 50 minutes of flight, the Centaur upper stage deployed the Peregrine lunar lander on its Moon-bound trajectory.  After deployment, Astrobotic said its ground controllers had successfully established contact with Peregrine. 

A few hours later statements starting coming out revealing trouble with the mission.  First reports were that the vehicle was having trouble locking its position to point at the sun and thereby charge its batteries.

However, later on Monday morning, about six hours after liftoff, Astrobotic released an updated statement. While the vehicle's avionics systems, including the primary command and data handling unit and the thermal, propulsion, and power controllers, had all powered on and performed as expected, there was a problem.

"After successful propulsion systems activation, Peregrine entered a safe operational state," the company said. "Unfortunately, an anomaly then occurred, which prevented Astrobotic from achieving a stable sun-pointing orientation. The team is responding in real time as the situation unfolds and will be providing updates as more data is obtained and analyzed."

That sounds like either the system didn't turn on and off as intended or perhaps something interfered with the thrusters.  This afternoon, Astrobotic posted this on X:

Later in the day, the Pittsburgh-based company released another statement saying they had managed to point Peregrine's solar panels at the sun and get the onboard batteries fully charged, "and we are using Peregrine's existing power to perform as many payload and spacecraft operations as possible." 

They released the first image taken by an onboard camera that they say helps verify their diagnosis.  

Let me say up front that I have no idea what I'm looking at, but Astrobotic explains it this way:

 "The camera utilized is mounted atop a payload deck and shows Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) in the foreground," Astrobotic wrote in the X post that featured the photo. "The disturbance of the MLI is the first visual clue that aligns with our telemetry data pointing to a propulsion system anomaly."

"Disturbance of the MLI?"  There's a disturbance?  Without knowing what that's supposed to look like, I don't have a clue what they're talking about. 

While it looks like the Peregrine lander may not be totally lost, it seems like they're going to try to get whatever observations and "science" that they can get out of the mission without enough fuel to land and conduct the mission they were trying for.  

Next up in the race to be the first private spacecraft to land on the moon is currently set to be the Intuitive Machines IM-1, scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 NET February 10.  The launch date is dependent on NASA and DOD missions that have higher priority and are scheduled ahead of this one take place on time. 



9 comments:

  1. All that sitting around time waiting and waiting. You'd think they'd have waited to mount and close up the lander until the last possible moment, and kept running tests after tests after tests until then.

    Sucks.

    The one thing I didn't think would go wrong did.

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  2. The words “propulsion system anomaly” rarely betide good new.

    It’s too bad.

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  3. SiG, the MIL is a multi-layered "blanket that covers certain parts of the spacecraft (mostly the electronics) that prevent solar radiation from harming/overheating the parts it covers.
    From the camera shot it would appear that something (propellant) is pushing it outward - a sort of inflation (partial). With the picture and the telemetry from the prop tank pressure indicating dropping pressure, as well as the difficulty keeping it pointed properly towards the sun, they have determined that the craft is now in deep doo-doo and will shortly run out of propellant, Station-keeping prop usage and the leak have doomed it.

    I hope they can salvage SOMEthing from this launch!

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    1. I get a daily Space newsletter from a place called Payload and this may be the first thing I've ever posted from it, but...

      Shortly after lifting off aboard the Vulcan rocket’s maiden flight on Monday, the company announced that a propulsion anomaly prevented the lander’s solar panels from facing the Sun. As the lander’s battery reached “operationally low levels,” the team tried to reorient the craft to face the Sun.

      While the maneuver was successful, and the battery was fully charged by the Sun, the propulsion failure spelled the end of the spacecraft’s journey to the Moon due to a “critical loss of propellant” that is overtaxing the Attitude Control System thrusters. Late Monday night, Astrobotic estimated the mission likely has ~40 hours of fuel left.


      I think that 40 hours was from yesterday afternoon, so the future doesn't look bright.

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  4. While the Vulcan would have appeared to have flown OK, I wonder if the payload damage is a result of excess vibration, i.e. pogo. Very hard to test for without a flight, so an inevitable cost of being dummy payload No.1.
    But also a setback for Vulcan if this is so.

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    1. That's something that I wondered about. Naturally, nobody provides detailed engineering data on their launches and 99.99% of the world wouldn't understand it if we saw it. Just because a rocket followed the planned trajectory doesn't mean it was a good ride. If they're busily revising the expected vibrational acceleration levels maybe that will become known.

      That's ignoring things like a payload fairing hitting the payload instead of falling away cleanly.

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  5. Next up on the moon is the Japanese JAXA SLIM lander scheduled for January 19,

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Lander_for_Investigating_Moon

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    1. Right.

      I mention IM-1 because since SLIM is a JAXA and Japanese government-run mission, it hasn't been included in any of the things I've read about the "race for the first privately funded satellite to land on the moon." The Hakuto-R mission was included because that was funded and run by the private company ispace.

      Today I see a mess of YouTube videos calling this a NASA failure and America's first mission to the moon since the '70s. NASA paid some money to both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, but it was like a contribution to help them get started. NASA wasn't involved with running the program.

      As I understand these things...

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    2. Indeed, SiG, these armchair "specialists" wouldn't be able to analyze a pure sine wave, much less the vibration telemetry. I suppose they would blame SpaceX if the JAXA IM-1 mission were to fail (which, fingers crossed, it doesn't)!
      Typical noise from The Great Unwashed Masses.

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