Advanced Space’s CALM effort builds on experience developing low-thrust trajectories to near-rectilinear halo orbit demonstrated by the CAPSTONE program.
NASA funded development of CAPSTONE to test the stability of NRHO for the lunar Gateway program.
After several attempts, CAPSTONE established a crosslink with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to test the CAPS navigation capability.
CAPSTONE is a privately owned, NASA-funded cubesat operated by Colorado startup Advanced Space.
Terran Orbital developed and co-operated the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE).
CAPSTONE was designed, built, and integrated by Terran Orbital and led by Advanced Space.
CAPSTONE has provided NASA with rapid and low-cost data about operations in NRHO, the orbit planned for the Gateway lunar space station.
CAPSTONE collected more than 315,000 measurements from the Deep Space Network including the site at Morehead State University.
CAPSTONE was designed, built, and integrated by Terran Orbital Corporation.
Advanced Space demonstrated the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS) by collecting crosslink measurements between CAPSTONE and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on 2023-05-09.
A high-energy variant of Rocket Lab’s Photon was developed and launched in 2022 and successfully deployed the CAPSTONE spacecraft to lunar orbit for NASA.
A high-energy variant of Photon was developed and launched by Rocket Lab in 2022 and successfully deployed the CAPSTONE spacecraft to lunar orbit for NASA.
Rocket Lab developed and launched a high-energy variant of Photon in 2022 that deployed the CAPSTONE spacecraft to lunar orbit for NASA.
Controllers restored the ability to send commands to the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat on 2023-02-08.
CAPSTONE operators attempted a 2023-01-18 crosslink test with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter during which LRO received a signal from CAPSTONE but CAPSTONE did not collect ranging measurements from the returned signal.
CAPSTONE was unable to receive commands from 2023-01-26 until its onboard computer rebooted on 2023-02-06 when triggered by a command-loss timer.
CAPSTONE launched on 2022-06-28 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Mahia, New Zealand.
CAPSTONE took a four-month journey from launch to lunar orbit and performed an initial orbit insertion maneuver on 2022-11-13.
Once CAPSTONE finalizes insertion into NRHO, the team will prepare to demonstrate the CAPS software developed by Advanced Space to perform inter-satellite ranging with the goal of reducing ground station congestion.
CAPSTONE launched on Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon spacecraft bus aboard an Electron launch vehicle on 2022-06-28.