Lunar Flashlight
Lunar Flashlight — a 14 kg NASA CubeSat built to shine infrared lasers into the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's south pole to look for surface ice (launched 11 December 2022). Its thrusters underperformed, likely from blockages in the fuel lines, so it never reached lunar orbit; NASA ended the mission on 12 May 2023, and it flew past Earth into an orbit around the Sun.
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- NASA / JPL
- Launched
- December 11, 2022
- Status
- Completed
Trajectory
- Speed rel. Earth
- 40 km/s
- Computed from the cached state vector, relative to Earth
- Distance from the Sun
- 0.919 AU
- Computed from the cached position
- Distance from Earth
- 1.24 AU
- Computed from cached positions
- Distance from Mars
- 0.707 AU
- Computed from cached positions
Mission
Lunar Flashlight was a 14 kg NASA CubeSat with a new way to look for ice where the Sun never shines. From a low orbit over the Moon's south pole it was to fire four infrared lasers into the permanently shadowed craters and measure how much light came back at wavelengths that ice absorbs. It was launched on 11 December 2022 on the Falcon 9 that carried ispace's first lunar lander. Soon after it separated, three of its four thrusters were found to be underperforming, and then the fourth began to fail as well; blockages in the fuel lines were the main suspect. Attempts to clear them only partly worked, and it never reached lunar orbit. NASA ended the mission on 12 May 2023. Five days later it flew past Earth and went into an orbit around the Sun.
- 2022Lunar Flashlight launches on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketLaunch
Sharing the rocket with ispace's first lunar lander.
- 2023Mission endedMission end
Its failing thrusters could not take it into lunar orbit.
- 2023Past Earth, into orbit around the SunMilestone
It leaves the Earth–Moon system.
Images
Images from open archives · credit shown per image