While the CubeSat couldn’t reach the lunar South Pole to help seek ice, it fulfilled several technology goals that will empower future missions for the benefit of humanity. NASA has ended its Lunar Flashlight mission, launched in 2022, due to insufficient thrust from its miniaturized propulsion s
to get into lunar orbit, despite months of effort by the operations team. Because the CubeSat cannot complete maneuvers to stay in the Earth-Moon system, NASA has called an end to the mission.
This illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Flashlight, with its four solar arrays deployed, shortly after launch. The small satellite, or SmallSat, will take about three months to reach its science orbit to seek out surface water ice in the darkest craters of the Moon’s South Pole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“It’s disappointing for the science team, and for the whole Lunar Flashlight team, that we won’t be able to use our laser reflectometer to make measurements at the Moon,” said Barbara Cohen, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But like all the other systems, we collected a lot of in-flight performance data on the instrument that will be incredibly valuable to future iterations of this technique.
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