After lift-off on Monday, the Peregrine Mission One (PM1) – which carries a piece of technology developed by UK scientists – experienced an “anomaly” that would have prevented the lander from achieving a stable position pointing towards the sun, according to Astrobotic, the US firm behind the project.
It is the first mission to fly under Nasa’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative, a scheme in which the space agency pays private companies to deliver scientific equipment to the moon.
Its instruments are intended to measure radiation levels, surface and subsurface water ice, the magnetic field, and the extremely tenuous layer of gas called the exosphere.
More controversially, the lander contains non-scientific payloads, including a physical coin “loaded with one bitcoin” and a Japanese “lunar dream capsule” that contains 185,872 messages from children from around the world.
Vulcan has spent roughly a decade in development to replace ULA’s workhorse Atlas V rocket and to rival the reusable Falcon 9 from Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
As well as the lunar lander, the mission is also delivering a memorial payload into space containing the remains and DNA of several people associated with the Star Trek television franchise, including the actors James Doohan, DeForest Kelley and Nichelle Nichols.
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After lift-off on Monday, the Peregrine Mission One (PM1) – which carries a piece of technology developed by UK scientists – experienced an “anomaly” that would have prevented the lander from achieving a stable position pointing towards the sun, according to Astrobotic, the US firm behind the project.
It is the first mission to fly under Nasa’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative, a scheme in which the space agency pays private companies to deliver scientific equipment to the moon.
Its instruments are intended to measure radiation levels, surface and subsurface water ice, the magnetic field, and the extremely tenuous layer of gas called the exosphere.
More controversially, the lander contains non-scientific payloads, including a physical coin “loaded with one bitcoin” and a Japanese “lunar dream capsule” that contains 185,872 messages from children from around the world.
Vulcan has spent roughly a decade in development to replace ULA’s workhorse Atlas V rocket and to rival the reusable Falcon 9 from Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
As well as the lunar lander, the mission is also delivering a memorial payload into space containing the remains and DNA of several people associated with the Star Trek television franchise, including the actors James Doohan, DeForest Kelley and Nichelle Nichols.
The original article contains 712 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!