![]() NASA's Artemis 1 mission launched 10 cubesats. SpaceX launches Japanese lander, UAE rover to the moon Cubesats: Tiny payloads, huge benefits for space research But nothing worked in time for the probe to achieve its planned lunar orbit. ![]() Mission team members tried several tactics to dislodge the debris, including increasing the fuel pressure to levels far above normal. It appears that the thrusters' fuel-feed system got clogged with some type of debris - metal shavings or powder, perhaps - that prevented them from firing at full capacity, NASA officials said. Lunar Flashlight's miniaturized propulsion system was a new type of technology as well, employing 3D-printed parts and "green" propellant. "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," Cohen said. "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," Barbara Cohen, the mission's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the same statement. The mission team also successfully tested Lunar Flashlight's four-laser reflectometer, suggesting that it could indeed have spotted water ice on the floors of moon craters. "Featuring a new precision navigation capability, the radio can be used by future small spacecraft to rendezvous and land on solar system bodies," NASA officials wrote in today's statement. Among those successes, NASA officials said, were the cubesat's Sphinx flight computer, a low-power, radiation-resistant variant developed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and the probe's upgraded radio, known as Iris.
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