WASHINGTON — NASA will continue efforts to restore contact with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft through mid-June, holding out hope that it can still conduct its mission to search for water ice on the moon.
In an April 30 statement, NASA said conditions should be favorable in May and the first half of June for Lunar Trailblazer to generate power and reactivate its radio, potentially enabling controllers to restore the spacecraft and carry out its original mission.
The small spacecraft launched as a secondary payload Feb. 26 on the Falcon 9 carrying the IM-2 lunar lander for Intuitive Machines. Contact with the spacecraft was lost less than 12 hours after launch, though, and has not been restored except for a brief period the day after launch.
NASA concluded that the spacecraft was “spinning slowly in a low-power state” that kept it from communicating as well as performing the maneuvers needed to enter orbit around the moon. Before the April 30 statement, the most recent update was March 12, when NASA said the prime science mission for Lunar Trailblazer “is no longer possible” but that there could be alternative missions.
“We know the position of Lunar Trailblazer from ground-based astronomy and we can model its spin and orientation based on those observations,” said Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, during an April 30 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG). “Right now, it doesn’t look like enough sunlight is getting to the spacecraft’s solar panels.”
That could change over the next several weeks, with a shifting orientation allowing more sunlight to reach its panels, which could charge up the spacecraft’s batteries and turn on its radio. “If that happens, we can start communicating with it. We can command it, and there’s still some hope that we can get it into a science orbit around the moon and do a lot of science.”
She acknowledged, though, that the effort is a “long shot” given what is known about the spacecraft. “It’s very difficult what we’re trying to do, but the mission operations team continues to monitor for the spacecraft signal using a global antenna network” augmenting NASA’s Deep Space Network.
In its statement, NASA said that if controllers are able to restore Lunar Trailblazer, the agency will conduct a “continuation/termination review” to determine if the spacecraft can carry out some version of its original mission. If contact isn’t restored by mid-June, “NASA will begin moving to close out the mission.”
“We’re still hopeful, but it’s looking at this time less likely that we’re going to be able to make contact again with Lunar Trailblazer,” Prockter concluded.
NASA established an independent review board in late April to determine the root cause of the problems with Lunar Trailblazer. That board will also identify lessons learned for future missions.
Lunar Trailblazer is one of three missions NASA selected in 2019 as part of its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program of low-cost, but higher-risk, planetary science missions. A second mission, Janus, was canceled in 2023 when delays in its rideshare launch kept it from carrying out its original asteroid flyby mission. The completed spacecraft are in storage, with some discussion about using them to visit the asteroid Apophis before it makes a close approach to Earth in 2029.
The third SIMPLEx mission, ESCAPADE, was to launch last fall on the first flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, but NASA pulled the twin spacecraft from that launch because delays in the launch vehicle meant it would miss its October 2024 launch window. The mission is now looking at options to launch ESCAPADE between this summer and next spring on New Glenn, said Shannon Curry, a member of the ESCAPADE science team, in a May 1 talk at MEPAG.