After today's much-anticipated launch before dawn, Astrobotic's lunar lander has had some problems on its first flight. According to the latest information provided by the company, although the lander successfully passed some tests after deployment, so far it has been unable to maintain its normal orientation to the sun. The anomaly occurred early in the Peregrine's journey to the moon, as it had to orbit the Earth before landing on the lunar surface. The latest news from Astrobotic stated that the spacecraft was unable to achieve "stable solar pointing."
During a typical lander landing on the moon, it must ensure adequate onboard power to power the various systems and subsystems required for guidance, payload maintenance and other systems. Landers then typically point toward the sun as they begin their journey, as did America's first private attempt at a moon landing.
However, early this morning, Astrobitc shared an update on X stating that its lander failed to successfully establish the sun's orientation. In other words, the lander's solar panels failed to point toward the sun after the propulsion system was successfully activated. That leaves the mission's future uncertain, including the fate of five NASA experiments and a dozen others on the lander.
Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander has different designs depending on its mission profile. Polar missions use side-mounted solar panels, while other missions use top-mounted solar panels to generate electricity in lunar orbit.
More than an hour after the initial update, Astrobotic shared more details about the anomaly. The company explained that while the lunar lander's panels initially failed to point toward the sun, it performed emergency maneuvers to put them in the correct orientation.
The rest of the statement, however, spelled doom for the first famous rocket launch in 2023 - especially for NASA's Artemis program. Astrobotic explained that its initial assessment of the situation showed that the problem causing the lunar lander's solar energy to be misdirected was related to the propulsion system.
This system is responsible for the landing of the lander on the moon. Therefore, Astrobotic warns that if this problem is indeed the cause of the mission anomaly, it is unlikely that the Peregrine Falcon will successfully complete its mission and land on the moon. If this happens, the journey of the "Peregrine Falcon" will be quite short compared with the Japanese space company ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, which successfully reached the moon but failed to complete the landing.
Astrobotic's director, John Thorton, was aware of the possibility of failure before today's mission. Mr. Totten pointed out in a media conference call before the launch that the "Peregrine Falcon" is only a lunar landing mission in NASA's CLPS plan. He added that there is a "string of next launches," including another from Astrobotic later this year.
After a failure, Astrobotic, like other space companies, carefully studies the abnormal data. However, analyzing this data takes time and should affect future launch schedules with NASA. Astrobotic's next lunar lander, Griffin, will be launched by SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. The next CLPS launch is another lunar lander, this time developed by Intuitive Machines. Astrobotic's NOVA-C lander will launch aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9. As of press time, Astrobotic is waiting for communications with the Peregrine to be restored after the expected power outage.