NASA reestablishes communications with its wayward CAPSTONE satellite

It's been a wild 48 hours for NASA's CAPSTONE mission. Following the lunar satellite's successful launch on Monday, ground control lost contact with the spacecraft shortly after it escaped Earth's gravity well and separated from its Electron rocket carrier. But after nearly a full day in the dark, NASA announced on Wednesday that its engineers have managed to reopen a line to the 55-pound satellite.

While the situation was concerning, NASA had accounted for just such a possibility. "If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days," a NASA spokesperson told Space.com on Monday.

Dubbed, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE), this spacecraft had spent nearly a week orbiting the planet in order to build up enough momentum to sling it on a trans lunar injection (TLI) route over to the moon. Once the CAPSTONE arrives on November 13th, it will follow the planned Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit of the forthcoming Lunar Gateway in order to verify the stability of the path. The Gateway will in turn act as a staging platform first for the larger Artemis mission and lunar colonization efforts, then forays further out into the solar system with an eye on eventually settling Mars. 

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