Since the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched in late February as a rideshare spacecraft along with a Falcon 9 launch, NASA has been providing a series of increasingly worrisome updates about the health of the small orbiter. Trailblazer appears to be spinning and out of contact with engineers back on Earth.
In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.
“Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state,” the space agency said. “They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication.”
Will not reach science orbit
As a result of these challenges, Lunar Trailblazer has not been able to complete a series of small thruster firings over the last week that would put it on course to enter its planned orbit around the Moon, a polar orbit 100 km above the surface. Upon reaching the Moon about six months from now, the intent of Trailblazer was to study the form, amount, and location of lunar ice in permanently shadowed craters.
If communication can be reestablished, the space agency said, it is still possible that Trailblazer could be put into some kind of orbit around the Moon and complete some of its objectives. However, the outlook appears to be fairly grim.
The declining fortunes of the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft raise additional questions about a NASA program to develop these kinds of low-cost missions. Known as the Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (or SIMPLEx in the tortured acronyms that NASA uses for some of its programs), the program was created to fund lower-cost planetary exploration missions. So far, it has yet to record any successes.
A series of failures
Amid the rising cost of its Discovery and New Frontiers-class missions, NASA sought to open a new category of missions that would trade lower cost for higher risk. Unfortunately, the record to date is poor:
- Q-PACE: A CubeSat mission to study protoplanetary disks launched in 2021 on Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne, but contact was never established with the spacecraft.
- LunaH-Map: A CubeSat mission to study lunar ice was part of NASA’s Artemis I mission in 2022, but likely due to extended launch delays, the spacecraft’s propulsion system failed.
- Janus: A dual-spacecraft mission intended to fly with the Psyche spacecraft in 2022, but due to delays with Psyche altered its trajectory, and the Janus mission’s asteroid targets were lost. The two spacecraft are in long-term storage.
- Lunar Trailblazer: The largest and most ambitious SIMPLEx mission to date, Trailblazer launched on February 28. It is currently in limbo.
- EscaPADE: A pair of 90-kg spacecraft, these two Mars orbiters were ready to fly on the debut of the New Glenn rocket last fall. After that launch vehicle’s delays, they are awaiting a new launch date.
Trailblazer was somewhat of an outlier among the other missions in this class. It was significantly larger than most of the other SIMPLEx spacecraft, and its cost exceeded the $55 million cap for such missions. Its cost as of late 2022 was $72 million. Due to this higher value, NASA allocated additional resources to ensure its success. Trailblazer’s primary contractor was also swapped from Ball Aerospace to Lockheed Martin.
A decadal survey of planetary science priorities that was published in April 2022 found that NASA should increase the cost cap of these missions to $80 million to give them a greater chance of success.