NASA Fails to Launch Revolutionary Water Discovery Mission to the Moon

NASA’s ambi­tious mis­sion to map water ice on the Moon has end­ed in fail­ure. The Lunar Flash­light space­craft was unable to gen­er­ate enough pow­er to reach its intend­ed tar­get, the Moon’s south pole, after launch­ing in December. 

Despite months of trou­bleshoot­ing, engi­neers were unable to fix the issue, and the probe is now des­tined to drift off into deep space.

The brief­case-sized Lunar Flash­light was devel­oped by stu­dents at Geor­gia Tech to search for exposed water ice in per­ma­nent­ly shad­owed craters on the Moon. If suc­cess­ful, it would have marked the first in-space demon­stra­tion of a new laser tech­nol­o­gy to map resources on the lunar sur­face. The mis­sion aimed to pave the way for future human explo­ration and long-term sur­vival on the Moon.

After sep­a­rat­ing from the craft that deliv­ered it to space, Lunar Flash­light was expect­ed to take four months to reach the Moon. How­ev­er, short­ly after detach­ing, the probe failed to pro­duce enough thrust to leave Earth­’s orbit and begin the jour­ney. NASA spent months analysing the issue and attempt­ing fix­es to no avail.

While dis­ap­point­ed in the mis­sion’s fail­ure, NASA remains hope­ful about the new tech­nolo­gies it demon­strat­ed. Lunar Flash­light proved sev­er­al com­po­nents that will ben­e­fit future space mis­sions accord­ing to Bar­bara Cohen, the mis­sion’s prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor. ” Although we were unable to achieve the intend­ed lunar sci­ence objec­tives, we col­lect­ed a lot of in-flight per­for­mance data on the instru­ment that will be incred­i­bly valu­able to future iter­a­tions,” Cohen said.

The bold but bud­get-friend­ly mis­sion offered a glimpse of an excit­ing future for space explo­ration. Although Lunar Flash­light nev­er made it to the Moon, the lessons learned from its fail­ure will help guide the next gen­er­a­tion of space­craft search­ing for resources on — and beyond — Earth. By push­ing tech­no­log­i­cal bound­aries on a small scale, mis­sions like Lunar Flash­light pave the way for greater dis­cov­er­ies in the final frontier.