NASA's tiny CAPSTONE probe goes silent on its way to the moon
Source: Space.com
Artist's illustration of NASA's tiny CAPSTONE probe in its halo-shaped lunar orbit. CAPSTONE is scheduled to arrive at the moon on Nov. 13, 2022, but that future is in doubt; mission team members lost contact with the cubesat shortly after it began flying freely on July 4. (Image credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)
CAPSTONE has gone dark. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) NASA probe ceased communicating with its handlers yesterday (July 4), shortly after it deployed successfully from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus and began its long trek to the moon. "The spacecraft team currently is working to understand the cause and re-establish contact. The team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network," NASA spokesperson Sarah Frazier wrote in an emailed statement today (July 5).
"If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days," Frazier added. "Additional updates will be provided as soon as possible." CAPSTONE (short for "Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment" ) launched atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster on June 28 and spent nearly a week in Earth orbit, spiraling farther and farther away from our planet via occasional Photon engine burns.
The mission notched two huge milestones yesterday: The Photon fired its engine for a final time, accelerating CAPSTONE out of Earth orbit and on a path toward the moon. Shortly thereafter, the microwave-oven-sized cubesat successfully separated from the spacecraft bus and began flying freely.
If all goes according to plan, CAPSTONE will take a long, looping route to the moon, finally slipping into a near rectilinear halo orbit around Earth's natural satellite on Nov. 13. The mission's main goal is to test the stability of this highly elliptical orbit, which NASA has selected for its Gateway space station, a key piece of the agency's Artemis program of lunar exploration.
Read more: https://www.space.com/nasa-capstone-moon-cubesat-communication-loss
More at NASA here - https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/2022/07/05/capstone-update-on-communications-issue/
Crossing fingers they can get a hold of it!
= new reply since forum marked as read
And the Turnpike is even slower than that if the exit is closed for construction... then you gotta go 10 miles to the next one, where there's always a backup.
That's what the OP is about! 
(yes smiley pun intended 
)
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/small_spacecraft/capstone
(as a retired fed - we even used to do stupid stuff like that during the period when "teams" were the latest fad (I think when GPRA was first enacted) and you even named it and spent who knows how long coming up with all this stuff to define the "team" while you could have been working on the problem at hand )
It's totally obvious!
(and retired ones like me!!! )
