NASA still trying to revive silent Lunar Trailblazer moon orbiter

NASA hasn’t given up on Lunar Trailblazer yet.

The 440-pound (200-kilogram) probe went silent a day after its Feb. 26 launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Shortly after liftoff, the mission team determined that Lunar Trailblazer was spinning slowly and running low on power, as it could not orient itself to harvest enough sunlight to charge its batteries as planned.

More than two months have passed since that rather dire assessment, but NASA is still working to revive the orbiter — and it will keep doing so for another six weeks.

“The mission team’s modeling indicates that the lighting conditions from May through mid-June are favorable to provide enough sunlight on the spacecraft’s solar panels to recharge the batteries to an operational level and potentially regain command of the spacecraft,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Wednesday (April 30).

“The mission team has determined that, if the ability to command the spacecraft can be reestablished, the propulsion system is thawed and the instruments are operable, it may be possible to return the spacecraft to an elliptical lunar orbit and complete its lunar science objectives,” they added.

The mission team knows Lunar Trailblazer’s precise position thanks to ground-based tracking, NASA officials said the update. If contact is successfully reestablished, the agency will hold a “continuation/termination review” to determine if the probe can indeed proceed with its mission.

“If a signal isn’t received by the end of the period, however, NASA will begin moving to close out the mission,” the update reads.

The $94 million Lunar Trailblazer mission aims to map the moon‘s water stores from lunar orbit, gathering information that could aid future crewed exploration of Earth’s nearest neighbor. And that’s a key NASA goal: Via its Artemis program, the agency is working to establish one or more bases near the moon’s south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice.

Lunar Trailblazer launched with another spacecraft that was designed to help NASA’s moon endeavors — Athena, the second moon lander from Houston company Intuitive Machines.

But things didn’t go as planned for Athena, either; the lander toppled over shortly after touching down near the moon’s south pole on March 6, bringing a premature end to its scheduled 10-day mission.