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- Developed by Georgia Tech students, Lunar Flashlight was to map water ice in dark craters at the Moon’s south pole with a laser
- However, after several months of unsuccessful attempts, NASA finally ended the mission due to a problem with the probe’s thrusters.
- The mission had launched in December 2022 with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket but technical problems on the CubeSat were identified shortly after liftoff
NASA has just announced on May 12, 2023 the end of the Lunar Flashlight mission, which was to explore and locate water ice deposits on the Moon, according to the SpaceNews site. The decision was taken five months after the launch of the space probe, which never managed to place itself in orbit around the Moon due to a propulsion problem. Lunar Flashlight was a low-cost mission, based on a CubeSat, a small space probe the size of a suitcase.
She was to use four lasers operating at four different infrared wavelengths to differentiate water ice from regolith by scanning regions of the Moon’s south pole shrouded in permanent darkness. These regions are considered as potential sources of water for future manned missions of the Artemis program.
Why NASA is ending this promising mission
Alas, the space probe ran into technical issues shortly after its launch in December 2022 with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Its propulsion system, which used a non-toxic fuel called ASCENT (Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic), failed. produces the thrust needed to place the probe into near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon.
Engineers tried for several months to solve the problem, attributed to the presence of debris blocking the fuel lines. NASA’s JPL even attempted a last-ditch maneuver to unclog the obstructions by increasing fuel pump pressure beyond operational limits while opening and closing the valves. This technique, tried on one of the probe’s four thrusters, had shown some success, sometimes producing increased levels of thrust.
But these efforts were not enough to keep the probe in the vicinity of the Moon, leading NASA to make this difficult decision. Those in charge of the mission had already had to give up several of their objectives during this time. They had thus given up placing the probe in NRHO orbit (almost rectilinear halo orbit) as initially planned with a functional propulsion system. But they still hoped to place the CubeSat in distant Earth orbit, allowing it to make, at a minimum, monthly flybys of the lunar south pole.
The exact cause of the debris in the propulsion system is unclear. Daniel Cavender, who was the CubeSat’s propulsion system manager at Nasa NASA – and is now director of Rubicon Space Systems, a division of Plasma Processes LLC that markets the CubeSat’s propulsion system – notes that the constraints imposed by the design of the probe prevented the engineers from putting filters on all the fuel lines:
“Due to size constraints, we couldn’t put filters everywhere. So we relied heavily on precision cleaning, inspections and contamination control. But there was a problem in the process”explains the manager.
