NASA's cubesat makes it to the Moon to test orbit for human visitors NASA's CAPSTONE spacecraft has become the first cubesat to make it into lunar orbit, despite suffering a navigational glitch that briefly caused it to lose communication with Mission Control en route. The cubeSat arrived at its target destination on Sunday at 1939 EST (0039 UTC), NASA confirmed. CAPSTONE – which stands for …
There would certainly be a Plan B, and probably C, D, E and so on.
Likely orbits that are better known and don't require an exploratory satellite feature in that list.
But when the advantages of A are so good, and the cost of putting a Cubesat there is reasonable, why wouldn't you have a go?
No, not really. But this orbit is dictated by Newton's laws of gravity, so it's a pretty good bet.
This is more about "can you track and control the spacecraft precisely enough at this distance? And what problems will it run into that we haven't thought of? Are there perturbations that we haven't accounted for?"
And this wasn't a "navigational glitch" and it wasn't "incorrect telemetry" as per the article - this is a stuck crossfeed valve. If they fire any of a certain set of thrusters, then another thruster fires as well. The solution of course, is to take that into account when planning maneuvers.
"could we build a space elevator on the moon?"
Simple answer? Probably, yes.
Actual answer? You'd need a permanently manned moon base and manufacturing facilities or some way of building the parts either on Earth or in orbit and getting the stuff there. At which point you need something a bit larger and robust than the ISS and enough people able to stay there on long enough rotations to build it up and down from a Lunar-stationary orbit. Ideally, that space station will form the mid point of the space elevator so probably needs a decent amount of mass to keep everything stable. Finally, of course, you need there to be something on the Moon you can export to make it all worthwhile or a really really good reason to have large amounts of people or equipment travelling too and from the Moon on a frequent basis.
PS. I am neither a rocket scientist nor a space engineer but have read lots of SF and many space based comments here on El Reg, so make of that what you will, YMMV, values of space stock may go down as well as up, do not invest in more Lunar land plots than you can afford to lose.
I was wondering about that as well. Electric aircraft on Earth use propellers, which require that invisible substance that's so lacking on the Moon - air. Ion engines aren't up to the task at our current level of tech, which is more suited for a soft but sustained thrust in no gravity having environment.
I wonder what they've come up with?
Well, it's here folks, El Reg has gone fully Yank.
I know it's a story about NASA, but a sloppy conversion to kg from lbs (that *only* Americans use) and not even an attempt to convert from Miles is really taking the biscuit.
Truly we should have the 2.8677 Adult Badgers sized cubesat in an orbit of 25146.7257 Devon fatburgs by 3258299.6947 Brontosaurus'.
NASA did. Their primary audience for explainer articles is US taxpayers, who are accustomed to units like (avoirdupois) pounds, (statute) miles, and (Gregorian) months rather than kilograms, kilometers, and megaseconds. They probably prefer specifying SI units in technical documents.
You’ve cut the phrase too deeply — it’s not “near-rectilinear”, but “near-rectilinear halo”. Starting with a circle of a particular diameter, within which a halo orbit and an elliptical orbit both have the same maximum diameter as the circle’s diameter, some of the halo orbit’s segments will have a lesser curvature than those of the elliptical orbit, and other segments will have a greater curvature than those of the elliptical orbit. The “near-rectilinear” part suggests that the halo orbit’s segments of lesser curvature will be much longer than its segments of greater curvature.
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