ASA has re-established contact with one of its satellites that stopped communicating on its way to the moon.
Engineers were able to contact the tiny CubeSat on Wednesday after it ceased communication with the Deep Space Network on Tuesday. The DSN is NASA’s radio antenna network that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions as well as some orbiting Earth.
The CubeSat is the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, also known as CAPSTONE. The satellite left Earth’s orbit Monday, marking an important milestone on its planned four-month journey to the moon.
The connection difficulties forced the mission team to delay the satellite’s first trajectory correction maneuver originally scheduled for July 5, NASA said. These are a series of planned corrections to increase the accuracy of the orbit transfer to the moon.
After CAPSTONE successfully left Earth’s orbit, it started charging its onboard battery using solar arrays, according to an update from NASA.
The CubeSat is waiting for the trajectory correction and remains on the overall intended course for its ballistic lunar transfer,
