A US spacecraft meant to be the first American lunar lander to visit the moon in half a century is instead on a collision course with Earth. The Peregrine 1 moon lander was designed by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and is carrying payloads for NASA.
Peregrine was launched on January 8 from Cape Canaveral, Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket, but within hours it was announced that the vehicle had a propellant leak that would prevent it from reaching its intended destination.
The ailing craft is now expected to burn up in the atmosphere, perhaps on Thursday according to public data crunched by amateur space watchers like Tony Dunn and others.
NASA and Astrobotic are planning to hold a joint news conference on the mission on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the company says Peregrine remains “responsive, operational and stable” and that the leak has “practically stopped.”
“The team continues to work with NASA and US government agencies to assess the final trajectory path in which the vehicle is expected to burn up,” Astrobotic said in a statement on Monday. “Peregrine is now about 218,000 miles away from earth.”
It’s not yet clear what caused the propellant leak, which Astrobotic has said is linked to “an anomaly.”
Although it will never make it to the moon, the mission is not a total loss. NASA says that a few of the payloads have managed to collect science data on the radiation envir0nment in space.
Astrobotic was part of the Google Lunar X Prize competition, but disconnected itself from the program, which no team ever did win. The company went on to be selected for a contract through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for the Peregrine 1 mission.
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