MacMusic  |  PcMusic  |  440 Software  |  440 Forums  |  440TV  |  Zicos
capstone
Search

NASA's CAPSTONE Mission Launches To the Moon

Tuesday June 28, 2022. 09:30 PM , from Slashdot
A small NASA-financed spacecraft launched from New Zealand on Tuesday, kicking off the space agency's plans to send astronauts back to the moon in a few years. From a report: The spacecraft, called CAPSTONE, is about the size of a microwave oven. It will study a specific orbit where NASA plans to build a small space station for astronauts to stop at before and after going to the moon's surface. At 9:55 p.m. local time (5:55 a.m. Eastern time), a 59-foot-tall rocket carrying CAPSTONE lifted off from a launchpad along the eastern coast of New Zealand. Although the mission is gathering information for NASA, it is owned and operated by a private company, Advanced Space, based in Westminster, Colo.

For a spacecraft headed to the moon, CAPSTONE is inexpensive, costing just under $30 million including the launch by Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company. The first two stages of Electron rocket placed CAPSTONE into an elliptical orbit around Earth. For this mission, Rocket Lab essentially added a third stage that will methodically raise the altitude of the spacecraft over the next six days. At that point, CAPSTONE will head on its way to the moon, taking a slow but efficient path, arriving on Nov. 13.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/06/28/1926257/nasas-capstone-mission-launches-to-the-moon?utm_...
News copyright owned by their original publishers | Copyright © 2004 - 2024 Zicos / 440Network
Current Date
Mar, Thu 28 - 09:16 CET