Astrobotic Technolgy’s Peregrine Mission One lunar lander has officially ended its mission, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Astrobotic Technology launched its Peregrine Mission One lunar lander aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket bearing multiple payloads on January 8. However, not long after its launch, an anomaly in its propulsion system disrupted the entire mission, causing the craft to leak propellant and slowly lose power, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Scientists ultimately determined that the “safe and responsible” course of action for the craft was to let it burn up in Earth’s atmosphere six days after its launch.
Astrobotic issued its final mission update on January 19 in a press release, confirming the craft’s controlled reentry in the South Pacific Ocean on January 18. The company is already planning its next mission to the moon.
“We look to the future and our next mission to the Moon, Griffin Mission One. All of the hard-earned experience from the past 10 days in space along with the preceding years of designing, building, and testing Peregrine will directly inform Griffin and our future missions,” read Astrobotic’s press release.
Despite not landing on the lunar service as intended, the craft achieved several other scientific goals. NASA announced that four out of the five payloads on board, those being their Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS), Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS), and Peregrine Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS) had successfully activated and collected data.
Only NASA’s Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) could not complete its mission as it did not reach the lunar surface. Scientists are currently interpreting the data the devices captured.
“Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission provided an invaluable opportunity to test our science and instruments in space, optimizing our process for collecting data and providing a benchmark for future missions,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, per the release. “The data collected in flight sets the stage for understanding how some of our instruments may behave in the harsh environment of space when some of the duplicates fly on future CLPS flights.”
