Capstone Arrives to Orbit at the Moon

The CAPSTONE mission operations team verified that the NASA spacecraft reached its moon orbit on Sunday night. At 7:39 p.m. EST, the CubeSat successfully carried out its first orbit insertion maneuver, firing its thrusters to launch the spacecraft into orbit.

Rocket Lab launched the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE), a microwave oven-sized CubeSat weighing just 55 pounds (25 kg), on a highly effective transfer orbit to the Moon using our Electron rocket and new Lunar Photon upper stage. Capstone is presently in an NRHO, or near-rectilinear halo orbit. The Gateway space station, which will assist NASA’s Artemis missions and orbit the moon, will also use this same NRHO. According to NASA, the first CubeSat to function on the Moon is Capstone, which is also the first spacecraft to fly an NRHO.

Launched from New Zealand on June 28, 2022, the primary goal of the CAPSTONE mission is to use a real spacecraft to verify the proposed orbital stability predictions for the Gateway. Capstone will perform two more clean-up operations to enhance its orbit during the course of the following five days. The crew will examine the data following these maneuvers to ensure that Capstone is still on track in the NRHO. Flying a low-energy trajectory that will distance it 1.2 million kilometers from Earth, Capstone has traveled to the moon in more than four months. For NASA, Advanced Space in Westminster, Colorado, owns and manages CAPSTONE.