Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket successfully launched NASA’s lunar satellite CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) in June, performing the test work of the US manned lunar mission. On July 4th CAPSTONE began its journey to the moon. But during testing, engineers noticed inconsistencies in the ranging data, and sent a command to try to access the diagnostic data, but the command format didn’t match the radio’s requirements, and the satellite fell silent. Its fault detection system was supposed to restart the radio immediately, but a bug in the flight software prevented that from happening. Communication has been interrupted. The autonomous flight software system eventually cleared the error and restored communication with the ground, allowing the ground team to implement recovery procedures and begin sending commands again.
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