NASA satellite breaks from orbit around Earth, heads to moon- pathbreaker for astronauts to follow
A satellite the size of a microwave oven successfully broke free from its orbit around Earth on Monday and is headed toward the moon, the latest step in NASA's plan to land astronauts on the lunar surface again.
It's been an unusual journey already for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy.
Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told The Associated Press it was hard to put his excitement into words.
“It's probably going to take a while to sink in. It's been a project that has taken us two, two-and-a-half years and is just incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute,” he said. “So to see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the moon, it's just absolutely epic.”
Beck said the relatively low cost of the mission — NASA put it at USD 32.7 million — marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration.
“For some tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “It's an insane capability that's never existed before.”
If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to take a new orbit around the moon called a near-rectilinear halo orbit: a stretched-out egg shape with one end of the orbit passing close to the moon and the other far from it.
Eventually, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway into the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the moon's surface as part of its Artemis program.
Beck said the
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