The Peregrine lunar lander is coming back home to die. Astrobotic’s shiny gold spacecraft is on a trajectory towards Earth, where it is expected to burn up in the planet’s atmosphere to conclude its tragic demise.
Failure in space dominated our headlines this week, with Astrobotic’s uncrewed lunar lander mission Peregrine-1 experiencing critical issues shortly after leaving Earth. Back on the ground, though, NASA finally—after months of trying—succeeded in opening the container filled with samples plucked from the asteroid…
Tragically, Astrobotic’s lander will not be able to pull off a soft landing on the lunar surface. However, Peregrine continues on its trajectory to the Moon, and as a small consolation, its onboard payloads have successfully powered on.
The Peregrine lander has less than a day to live, and the company behind the spacecraft may have figured out why its mission was doomed shortly after its launch.
Astrobotic, the team behind the Peregrine spacecraft, is urgently working to extract any possible value from its failing mission. This comes after a catastrophic propellant leak occurred just after yesterday’s launch, ending the spacecraft’s attempt to land on the Moon.
A mission to land a private U.S. lander on the Moon, and the first U.S. lander since the Apollo era, looks to be ending before it even had a chance to get started.
Update: January 8, 10:41 a.m. ET: Vulcan Centaur took off right on schedule, successfully blasting off from the Cape Canaveral launch pad and delivering Peregrine on its historic mission to the Moon.
An upcoming launch will usher in a new era of commercial payloads being dropped off to deep space destinations like the Moon. As we gain greater access to space, things are going to start getting weird.