Astrobotic Technology is a private spaceflight company. The Peregrine lander has been contracted by NASA under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to build and fly a lander to the surface of the moon. It should attempt a landing February 23, 2024.
For a successful mission the Peregrine lander needs to soft-land on the moon, and the payloads on the lander need to be operational. The Peregrine mission is followed by two Griffin missions.
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3.00@ScipioFabius Indeed. I hope they can salvage something and that this isn't a complete loss of propulsion.
@EvanDaniel Yeah, I suppose if the failure in the propulsion system is critical, there is no hope for a soft land.
https://www.astrobotic.com/peregrine-mission-one-update-2/
Astrobotic reports an anomaly of some kind.
@ScipioFabius I suspect the comms outage will be half a day because of Earth's rotation, and we won't find out if their maneuver worked or not until then. We might get hints if any amateurs are tracking its heartbeat from the other side of the world.
@Mqrius Hmm, could be the case, but it would be odd if their comms were connected only to their ground based center. But yeah, someone was commenting on that tweet that they are receiving signals on their dishes in Germany
@ScipioFabius I think normally these things are done with the DSN, but the DSN is overloaded so maybe they didn't book a slot.
DSN dish 53 seems to be trying to connect from Madrid but it doesn't indicate a successful connection yet.
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
The guy I linked above is in Italy though so we might indeed get some info from there too.
Hard to interpret the news, but at least they have communications and the maneuver was a success. The question is now if the propulsion system failure is critical and cant be salvaged.
