7 days ago
Sadly, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer failed to do what it said on the tin
NASA has given up trying to reestablish contact with a small spacecraft that launched in February to map lunar water.
The Lunar Trailblazer hitched a ride on the second Intuitive Machines robotic lunar lander mission, IM-2, which launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 26, 2025.
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The spacecraft separated as planned from the rocket about 48 minutes after launch, and the mission team established communications with it about 10 minutes later. But contact was lost the following day and was never reestablished, preventing them team from performing the necessary thruster operations to keep the spacecraft on its flight trajectory toward the moon. And on Monday, NASA said the mission was officially over.
The space agency added that from the limited data it had received, it appeared that the spacecraft's solar arrays had failed to properly orient toward the sun, causing its batteries to lose power.
'While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the moon,' Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a release, adding: 'Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end.'
The goal of the mission was to create high-resolution maps of water on the moon's surface. It could also have revealed what form the water is in, the amount present, and how it changes over time. NASA said the the maps built by the Lunar Trailblazer would also have supported future robotic missions and human exploration of the moon. More broadly, the endeavor could have helped scientists to better understand water cycles on airless bodies in our solar system.
In an effort to save the spacecraft, a number of organizations around the world had been listening for the the Lunar Trailblazer's radio signal while also tracking its position. But data from ground radar and optical observations indicated that Lunar Trailblazer was in a slow spin and heading deeper into space.
While the team had been hoping that the solar panels might receive sunlight and charge the batteries with enough power to turn on the radio and give it a chance of making contact, it never happened, and the Lunar Spacecraft is now too distant to save.
