NASA has scrapped a planned mission to the moon for the tiny Cubesat Lunar Flashlight, which is intended to hunt water ice in dark craters near the moon’s south pole. The briefcase-sized moonlight was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last December. It was a payload during the mission, whose main purpose was to send the Hakuto-R robotic lander from private Japanese company ispace to the moon.

The moonlight also had to be connected to the moon. However, the technology ran into problems with the demonstration propulsion facility, which was unable to generate enough thrust to reach lunar orbit as planned. The mission team worked on the problem for about six months but couldn’t solve it. Today (May 12), NASA announced that it has canceled its planned Lunar Flashlight mission.

“Technology demonstration is inherently higher risk and higher reward, so testing and education are important to NASA,” said Christopher Baker, small spacecraft technologies program manager at NASA Headquarters Space Technology Mission Office in Washington, DC. a statement today

“Moonlight has been very successful in being a testbed for new systems that have never flown into space before,” Baker added. “These systems and lessons learned from Lunar Flashlight will be used for future missions.”

Those achievements include the Cubesat Sphinx on-board computer, a low-power, radiation-proof variant developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and the probe’s upgraded radio known as Iris, NASA officials said.

“With this new precision navigation feature, radio can be used by future small spacecraft to rendezvous with and land on Solar System objects,” NASA officials said in a statement today. The mission team also successfully tested the Lunar Flashlight’s quad-laser reflectometer, suggesting it could indeed detect water ice at the bottom of lunar craters.

“It’s disappointing to the science team and the entire Lunar Flashlight team that we won’t be able to use our laser reflectometer to measure on the moon,” said Barbara Cohen, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. she said in a statement. state of maryland

“But like any other system, we’ve collected a lot of data on the instrument’s performance during flight, and this will be incredibly valuable for future iterations of this technique,” said Cohen.

The Lunar Flashlight’s miniature propulsion system was also a new technology using 3D-printed parts and “green” fuel. NASA officials said the engines’ fuel system appeared to be clogged with some kind of debris (possibly metal shavings or dust), preventing them from operating at full power. Mission team members tried various tactics to destroy the debris, including increasing fuel pressure to levels well above normal. But nothing worked in time for the probe to enter its planned lunar orbit.