Peregrine Moon mission runs into trouble after launching | BBC News

the first American space mission for more than half a century aimed at making a landing on the moon has run into an early technical hitch the parag green one robot Lander was launched earlier today but it's been unable to point its solar panels at the Sun the company behind the project astrobotic says it's trying to fix the problem but if it can't the mission won't be able to proceed well we can go live now to our science correspondent Jonathan Amos who's in The Newsroom for us Jonathan you've covered many of these kind of things over the years just bring us up to date on what exactly this particular snag is well we had a a picture perfect launch early this morning uh the paragen craft on the top of the new Vulcan rocket left uh Cape Canaveral in Florida everything seemed absolutely perfect and then about 7 hours after liftoff we got a statement from astrobotics is a private exploration company in Pittsburgh in the United States saying that their spacecraft had experienced an anomaly of some kind that's what uh they use the word that they use when something is uh not quite right uh the spacecraft they were going through the the standard checkouts uh that you do on a spacecraft when it comes off the top of the rocket uh you go through its systems you power everything up you check the data to see that it's all working properly and one of the things the spacecraft has to do one of the first things it has to do is to point its solar panels at the sun that's how you maintain power without power you don't have a mission um you know it's got to keep its batteries topped up and unfortunately the spacecraft as astrobotic have said has not been able to point at the sun stably now quite what that means it's not clear from the statement it could mean that it's doing it some of the time but then is losing uh track of where the sun is in the sky so you know it may topping up its batteries a bit and then it's losing track of the Sun and then the batteries are starting to uh discharge so their Engineers are working on it at the moment uh and they will have rehearsed many times scenarios just like this they will have a fault tree that they will be going through trying to sort it out so you know by no means is this Mission over yet um you know they will be working their way through what they think is wrong with it and it should be said also that spacecraft have a a fair degree of autonomy um so the spacecraft itself will recognize that it's not doing what it is supposed to do and then it will prioritize its systems so it will prioritize power maintenance obviously and it will also prioritize communication to Earth um Don and it doing that and the engineers doing what they're doing hopefully they'll be able to recover the situation Donathan how typical is it for this kind of Mission to get its power from solar panels briefly I mean is this is this something that's the first time uh no this is this is standard uh standard operating procedure they all go uh with solar panels very very few spacecraft uh go with uh nuclear batteries you know radioisotopes that decay produce heat and from that you generate electricity the vast majority of space missions will use solar panels it's free energy okay well it's a hoping that they uh manage to get it all working Jonathan and hopefully you can bring us the update when it's back on track really

Channel: BBC News

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Length: 3min 31sec (211 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024