Concept art of CAPSTONE. Image:
Illustration by NASA/Daniel Rutter
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.
If all goes to plan, it will become the first spacecraft to test-drive a zone known as the near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), a bizarre path around the Moon sculpted by the gravitational pulls of Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and even the planet Jupiter. The special elongated orbit hits a sweet spot for the Artemis program, a major effort led by NASA that aims to return humans to the Moon’s surface this decade, more than 50 years after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on an extraterrestrial world. Now, the CAPSTONE team—which includes the private space companies Advanced Space, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Stellar Exploration, Inc., and Rocket Lab—await this first small step toward the giant leap envisioned by the Artemis program. In addition to flying in this mysterious orbit, the mission will also pioneer a next-generation communications platform that could greatly simplify deep space exploration. “It is extraordinarily fun to sit and think through what [CAPSTONE] is going to be capable of, and how we could launch spacecraft to these destinations,” said Justin Treptow, NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP) deputy program executive in the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, in a call. “But to actually go out and do it is very different.”“Ultimately, CAPSTONE is a flight test,” added Christopher Baker, who serves as the program executive for SSTP, in the same call. “The role of a flight test is to separate the real from the imagined, and that's what we're setting about doing here. I'm really looking forward to transferring that theoretical knowledge into actual operational experience.”
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