Ten days after its launch, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander fell back to Earth, ending a trip to the moon’s orbital distance and back that was doomed by a propellant leak.
The mission began auspiciously on the night of Jan. 7-8 with a seemingly successful liftoff from Florida on United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket, powered by Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines. But hours after launch, the Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic team detected a problem with the propulsion system. So much propellant was lost that the team had to rule out a moon landing.
After days of troubleshooting, Astrobotic and NASA determined that the best course was to send the 8-foot-wide robotic spacecraft on a looping orbit that went out more than 240,000 miles from Earth — and then came back for a controlled atmospheric re-entry over a remote area of the South Pacific.
Astrobotic said telemetry received during Peregrine’s descent suggested that the spacecraft broke up during re-entry at 1:04 p.m. PT on Thursday.
Today, Space-Track.org said the U.S. Space Command confirmed the spacecraft’s decay. “That’s certainly good to hear,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told reporters during a news briefing.
“Peregrine Mission One has concluded,” Astrobotic said in a final mission update. “We look to the future and our next mission to the moon, Griffin Mission One. All of the hard-earned experience from the past 10 days in space, along with the preceding years of designing, building and testing Peregrine, will directly inform Griffin and our future missions.”
To mark the mission’s end, Astrobotic posted videos that were captured moments after last week’s spacecraft separation.
Peregrine also sent back what Astrobotic called “a stunning image” of a crescent Earth, captured by one of the lander’s cameras as it was closing in from a distance of more than 30,000 miles.
“The first attempt to take this photo yielded an oversaturated image, with the sun making the image too bright to see the Earth,” Astrobotic said in a posting on X / Twitter. “As a result, the team precisely slewed the spacecraft to reposition the sun to be hidden behind the think payload deck strut just to the left of Earth, which produced the starburst effects on the video and revealed the Earth’s crescent.”
Astrobotic said the image was dedicated “to our customers, partners and team who all stood with us throughout Peregrine Mission One.”
The Peregrine lander’s primary payload was a suite of NASA science instruments that would have gathered data about the environment around the lunar landing site. The space agency said that “all NASA payloads designed to power on have received power and collected data,” and that observations were made relating to the radiation environment and chemical compounds in the vicinity of the lander during its transit through space.
NASA had agreed to pay Astrobotic $108 million to deliver its science payloads to the lunar surface. “Ten percent of our award from NASA was subject to success criteria,” Thornton said. “We did not achieve all of the criteria to get all of that 10%, though we did achieve some of those milestones.”
Astrobotic and NASA will review Peregrine’s performance in detail to determine how much of that last 10% — which equates to $10.8 million — will be paid out.
Peregrine was also carrying more than a dozen non-NASA payloads — including a mini-rover and micro-robots, a “Lunar Library” carrying the equivalent of 60 million pages of information, DNA data archives, memorabilia and capsules of cremated remains. All those payloads were lost during re-entry.
“Of course the customers were disappointed that we didn’t reach the moon. That was their original intent with this mission,” said Dan Hendrickson, Astrobotic’s vice president of business development. “But they also knew all of the challenges and risks of a lunar mission, and how difficult it really is. … They did not waver.”
If the mission had been successful, Peregrine would have been the first commercial lander to touch down safely on the moon, and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to make a soft lunar landing since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The next spacecraft in line to go after those distinctions is Intuitive Machines‘ Nova-C lander, which is due to be launched to the moon’s south polar region on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as early as next month.
As was the case for Peregrine, NASA is paying Intuitive Machines to deliver hardware to the lunar surface under the aegis of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. Another CLPS-supported mission calls for Astrobotic’s Griffin lander to deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to a spot near the moon’s south pole late this year.
Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the precise timing of the Griffin mission will depend on the outcome of an investigation into Peregrine’s problems.
“We will not want to rush the findings,” he said. “We will want to make sure that they’re very well thought out … Once we have them, we’ll end up determining what action to take that will end up affecting the Griffin mission.”
This report was originally published on Jan. 18, and has been updated with fresh information from today’s news briefing. We’ve also corrected an inaccurate reference to the date of Peregrine’s launch that appeared in the initial version of the report.
