First-Ever Asteroid Mining Mission Loses Contact With Earth
Last week, California-based space company AstroForge launched what it claimed was the first "commercial deep space mission in history."
The company's plan was to send its washing machine-sized spacecraft, dubbed Odin, to visit an asteroid millions of miles from Earth and scout it as a potential mining site.
But mere hours after the spacecraft lifted off atop a SpaceX rocket last week — alongside Intuitive Machines' Athena lunar lander — the AstroForge team encountered issues while trying to communicate with the probe.
Then, less than 24 hours following launch, the team lost contact entirely.
"I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission," AstroForge founder Matt Gialich admitted in an update on X-formerly-Twitter over the weekend, as flagged by Space.com. "So we're going to keep our head up. We're going to keep trying over the weekend, and we'll see how far we get."
A number of space companies have raised huge amounts of funds with the promise of turning errant space rocks into a lucrative source of money. But many have failed to live up to that promise, folding before even venturing into space.
As the New York Times reports, AstroForge did initially make headway, sending a demonstration satellite into orbit in 2023.
Its followup Odin mission, though, is looking rough.
Odin made it over 186,000 miles away from home. The spacecraft did manage to unfold its solar panels and likely started charging, according to the company.
But then the company ran into some "massive issues," as Gialich wrote in an extremely detailed update posted on AstroForge's website on Saturday.
The team found that the polarization on Odin's antennas was "wrong" meaning that "both uplink and downlink for the first 4 hours of the mission did not work."
"No commands were getting through, and also, no data was getting down," Gialich wrote. Despite sending a number of commands, "we received nothing in return."
In the company's X update, Gialich said that the spacecraft may be tumbling at a "really, really slow speed."
The last contact the team received from Odin was 20 hours after liftoff. But the team isn't giving up yet.
"We have a plan over the weekend, and there is still a chance that we are going to be able to recover the vehicle," the founder said. "We do think we have some theories on what's going on, and if one of them is true, there is still a recovery path."
Beyond Odin, AstroForge is already eyeing an asteroid landing mission, dubbed Vestri, despite the major challenges with its current probe.
"We have probably the best group of investors in the world. A lot of them have doubled down on this company," Gialich said. "So regardless of the outcome of Odin, regardless if we ever talk to it again or we don't, we're going to roll these findings into the next mission."
More on mining asteroids: Asteroid Mining Startup About to Launch First Mission
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