NASA Re-Establishes Communication With CAPSTONE Satellite After Partial Outage

pcmag.com:

NASA has re-established communication with its CAPSTONE satellite after briefly losing contact.

CAPSTONE left Earth's orbit(Opens in a new window) on July 4 and "made initial contact with the DSN ground station in Madrid, Spain." After that, however, it was only able to make "partial contact with the Goldstone ground station in California."

That partial contact(Opens in a new window) allowed NASA and CAPSTONE's operator, Advanced Space, to determine the satellite's position and velocity despite the communications failure. Advanced Space says(Opens in a new window) this comms error delayed the first of CAPSTONE's trajectory-correction maneuvers, which was scheduled for July 5, but notes that the satellite was designed for "robustness to delays such as this." It also says that "the CAPSTONE mission team has been working around the clock and through the holiday weekend to support this important mission."

As of 11:30am ET today, NASA says(Opens in a new window) it has re-established communication with CAPSTONE. The agency hasn't offered additional details about the malfunction at time of writing.

CAPSTONE—the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment—is primarily intended to gather information about its near rectilinear halo orbit(Opens in a new window) as it circles the moon. That data will be used to inform the operation of a lunar space station called Gateway, which is expected to support the Artemis program(Opens in a new window) that will see NASA using the moon as a critical part of its efforts to send the first astronauts to Mars.

Ahead of CAPSTONE's launch, NASA said it planned to use the satellite to "demonstrate innovative spacecraft-to-spacecraft navigation technology