The spacecraft will arrive in lunar orbit in mid-November to help prepare for a future moon-orbiting outpost
The 55-pound cubesat launched today atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster, which lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula of New Zealand at 5:55 a.m. EDT .
The microwave-oven-sized CAPSTONE , by contrast, left our planet aboard the 59-foot-tall Electron, which is designed to send small satellites to Earth orbit. So CAPSTONE is taking the scenic route. CAPSTONE will fire its own thrusters occasionally over the next few months, keeping it on an efficient, low-energy trajectory toward the moon. The cubesat’s path will take it as much as 810,000 miles from Earth — more than three times the Earth-moon distance — before gravity pulls it back.
But no spacecraft has ever occupied a lunar NRHO before, so assumptions about its stability are just that — assumptions. And that’s where CAPSTONE comes in. The cubesat will spend at least six months in the NRHO, assessing its characteristics.