Launched as an auxiliary payload on Artemis 1, Cubesat may cease operations at the end of the month if it fails to ignite the propulsion system. The LunaH-Map spacecraft was one of 10 cube satellites launched as additional payloads during the Space Launch System’s maiden flight last November. The spacecraft planned to use the ion propulsion system on the 6U cube satellite to perform a lunar flyover maneuver that would eventually allow it to enter orbit a few days later.

However, this engine did not start because the engineers believed it was a stuck valve. In a presentation at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference on May 1, Craig Hardgrove, the mission’s principal investigator at Arizona State University, said the project anticipated problems, given the long delay between delivering the spacecraft to NASA between mid-2021 and November. . Launch in 2022.

“We told NASA that this propulsion system was not designed for a launch delay of more than four to five months,” he said, but there was no way to access Cubesat once the Orion spacecraft was docked with a degree adapter. It was installed in the fall of 2021.

Busek’s engine, called BIT-3, uses iodine as a fuel, and Hardgrove said engineers expected the iodine to evaporate over a long period of time and enter the valves. They used heaters to release the valve, but these efforts were unsuccessful both before and in the months that followed. “As far as we can tell, this valve is really, really stuck.”

That effort is ongoing, but time is running out to get the LunaH-Map engines up and running, he said. “If we can’t get the system up and running, we’ll probably shut it down at the end of May.” In a final effort to open the valve, the controllers raise the temperature of the entire drive system to evaporate more iodine and increase the pressure. “At some point, we might blow up a valve, which could be good or very bad,” he said. “That’s all we can try for now.”

Hardgrove said the propulsion system is the only spacecraft system that doesn’t work. “If we didn’t have to wait more than a year, I think we would at least have a good chance of fulfilling our science mission.”

This mission involved an orbit that would bring the spacecraft closer to the moon’s south pole, using a neutron spectrometer to map the presence of hydrogen associated with the water ice deposits there. He noted that the mission tested the spectrometer during the moon’s high-altitude flyby in November.

LunaH-Map was one of 10 cube satellites launched on Artemis 1, many of which suffered from varying degrees of technical issues. These ranged from propulsion issues on the LunaH-Map to the spacecraft that went unheard or lost contact shortly after the SLS deployment.

“We had to leave the mission for some of these missions on Artemis 1,” said Dan Grebow, a former JPL engineer now working at mission design and navigation firm Nabla Zero Labs, during a panel discussion at the conference.

He cited the example of the NEA Scout, a cube satellite designed to deploy a solar sail and fly to a near-Earth asteroid, but unheard of after launch. Instead of continuing to look for Deep Space Network time that could be used by other missions, the project was shut down without any reports on it, he said. “At some point, you need to know when to quit.”

Hardgrove, who was also on the panel, defended the Cubesat missions performed on Artemis 1. “It’s unfair to call any of these a failure,” he said. “They’ve all developed a significant amount of technology.”

“Many of these missions were very close to success,” he said. “It’s not fair to throw it all away.”