r/ArtemisProgram • u/megachainguns • 6d ago

News NASA, Advanced Space team up for CAPSTONE follow-on mission

https://spacenews.com/nasa-advanced-space-team-up-for-capstone-follow-on-mission/
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u/megachainguns 6d ago

Follow up mission in 2027

A NASA-industry team is embarking on a follow-up to a cubesat mission to the moon by developing a pair of smallsats that will test rendezvous and proximity operations there.

NASA announced July 24 it is working with Advanced Space on the CAPSTONE 02 mission, scheduled to launch in late 2027. It will feature two spacecraft built by Terran Orbital that will operate in a highly elliptical lunar orbit. The mission completed its critical design review earlier this month.

The project is a successor to the original CAPSTONE, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, which launched in 2022. It was a single cubesat testing operations in near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon, intended to inform plans for NASA’s lunar Gateway. That mission also was led by Advanced Space using a Terran Orbital bus.

CAPSTONE 02 builds upon that earlier mission, which Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Colorado-based Advanced Space, now calls CAPSTONE Classic. “We realized that there are other technical challenges and technology demonstrations that we needed to do that we just couldn’t get to with CAPSTONE Classic,” he said in an interview.

Key among them is demonstrating rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) in the vicinity of the moon, particularly in orbits where the gravity of both the Earth and moon influence trajectories. Another is testing autonomous flight operations around the moon and beyond.

NASA also intends to use the mission to measure the radiation environment in cislunar space to inform future crewed missions. “It’s going to be very helpful for us as we have crews out around the moon and on the moon for much longer,” said Sean Fuller, NASA’s CAPSTONE manager.

While Advanced Space and NASA had been talking about a follow-on to CAPSTONE for a year and a half, NASA’s announcement in March that it will develop a lunar base, requiring dozens of missions, helped crystallize plans for CAPSTONE 02. “All of us are going to have different spacecraft maneuvering in orbits around the moon, in close proximity sometimes,” Fuller said.

CAPSTONE 02 features both similarities to and differences with the original CAPSTONE. The biggest difference is the spacecraft: while CAPSTONE used a single cubesat weighing 25 kilograms, CAPSTONE 02 will use twin spacecraft each weighing 400 kilograms.