Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander suffers major failure
According to updates by the engineering team running Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, launched early today by ULA’s Vulcan rocket, the lander’s propulsion system suffered a major failure shortly after activation.
After successfully separating from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander began receiving telemetry via the NASA Deep Space Network. Astrobotic-built avionics systems, including the primary command and data handling unit, as well as the thermal, propulsion, and power controllers, all powered on and performed as expected. After successful propulsion systems activation, Peregrine entered a safe operational state. Unfortunately, an anomaly then occurred, which prevented Astrobotic from achieving a stable sun-pointing orientation.
The company later released an update, stating that the failure caused “a critical loss of propellant” that will make the mission impossible as planned. They are reassessing to see if they can come up with an alternate plan, but without sufficient fuel no lunar landing will be possible under any mission profile.
Peregrine is a smaller test version of Astrobotic’s larger Griffin lunar lander, which has contracts with NASA and ESA for later missions. This failure will likely impact those missions, forcing either delays or redesigns.
This mission was always an engineering test mission designed to prove out Astrobotic’s landing design, so experiencing a failure was not a surprise. The problem is that this failure occurred so soon after launch that it prevents the company from testing that landing design, at all.
