Lunar Flashlight launched! Almost three and a half years after I started working on this project, I got to watch from the Mission Operations Center in Atlanta as a Falcon 9 rocket carried our CubeSat into space. In the months following our December 11, 2022 launch, we carried out a successful technology demonstration with the spacecraft. This included successful operations of the propulsion system, near-infrared spectroscopy instrument, and Sphinx command and data handling system. In addition, using the onboard Iris radio, we demonstrated pseudorandom-noise delta differential one-way ranging (PN Delta-DOR) for the first time in space.
Early on, we identified variable performance from the propulsion system. In the following five months, we carried out a wide assortment of propulsion tests in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get Lunar Flashlight close enough to the Moon to perform science experiments. The story of our approach and the lessons we learned are captured in a new paper at this year’s Small Satellite Conference. It can be accessed here.
One of my favorite mission ops moments was on March 23, 2023 when, staffing the “Spacecraft Link Engineer” position on the operations team, I uplinked the command to take the above photo of the Earth and the far side of the Moon using the spacecraft’s onboard star tracker camera.
Paper Abstract
The Lunar Flashlight Propulsion System (LFPS) was developed as a technology demonstration to enable the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft to reach Lunar orbit and to desaturate onboard reaction wheels. While the system produced over 16 m/s of delta-v and successfully managed momentum, variable thrust performance, most likely due to debris in the propellant flow path, kept the spacecraft from reaching the Moon. This paper details the in-flight journey of the LFPS, highlighting both successes and challenges met throughout the mission, and provides lessons learned applicable to future CubeSat missions and additively manufactured propulsion systems.
Conference
