Ten days after its launch, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander fell back to Earth, ending a trip to the moon’s orbital distance and back that was doomed by a propellant leak.
The mission began auspiciously on the night of Jan. 7-8 with a seemingly successful liftoff from Florida on United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket, powered by Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines. But hours after launch, the Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic team detected a problem with the propulsion system. So much propellant was lost that the team had to rule out a moon landing.
After days of troubleshooting, Astrobotic and NASA determined that the best course was to send the 8-foot-wide robotic spacecraft on a looping orbit that went out more than 240,000 miles from Earth — and then came back for a controlled atmospheric re-entry over a remote area of the South Pacific.
Astrobotic said telemetry received during Peregrine’s descent suggested that the spacecraft broke up during re-entry at 1:04 p.m. PT Jan. 18.
Today, Space-Track.org said the U.S. Space Command confirmed the spacecraft’s re-entry. “That’s certainly good to hear,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told reporters during a news briefing.
“Peregrine Mission One has concluded,” Astrobotic said in a final mission update. “We look to the future and our next mission to the moon, Griffin Mission One. All of the hard-earned experience from the past 10 days in space, along with the preceding years of designing, building and testing Peregrine, will directly inform Griffin and our future missions.”
