Nasa’s Capstone micro-satellite, launched by Rocket Lab from Mahia on June 28, has entered lunar orbit.

The Kiwi-American firm confirmed this morning that the micro-satellite completed its initial orbit insertion manoeuvre on Monday NZ time.

Capstone has become both the first spacecraft launched from NZ soil to reach the Moon’s orbit, and the first “cubesat” or microwave oven-sized satellite to enter lunar orbit.

The 25kg Capstone will follow an experimental, lop-sided “near-rectilinear” orbit that will see it come as close as 1500km to the Moon’s north pole and as far as 70,000km above its south pole.

If successful, orbit will be replicated by Lunar Gateway, a “mini space station” that Nasa plans to put into lunar orbit in 2024 or 2025. Gateway will act as a way station for astronauts to visit on their way to the Moon. It will also be a rendezvous point for hardware and supplies for crewed surface missions. It’s all part of the US space agency’s “Artemis” push to return people to the lunar surface.

Lost in space

Capstone’s four-and-a-half-month flight wasn’t without drama.

Rocket Lab staged a successful launch and, after several days of slowly raising its orbit, fired a final burn to set the microsatellite on a trajectory to the Moon on July 4 (symbolically, Independence Day in the US).

At that point, Rocket Lab handed over control of the mission to two other private space operators - US firms Advanced Space and Terran Orbital.

Just hours later, problems began.

On July 5, Nasa said contact had been lost with the microsatellite. It took a day and a half to re-establish communications and execute a delayed course-correction manoeuvre.

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Capstone ran into more trouble two months later. The probe suffered a glitch during a trajectory-correcting engine burn on September 8. It began to tumble and went into a protective safe mode as a result.

The issue was traced to a wonky value, and Capstone was put back on track in early October.

Capstone will now spend several days fine-tuning its orbit.

Next up: Venus and Mars

Venus and Mars are next on Rocket Lab’s interplanetary agenda.

In August, Rocket Lab said its mission to send a microsat to Venus is on track to launch in May next year, with the tiny probe scheduled to arrive in October.

The self-funded mission is a passion project for Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck. His form is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the design of the probe - which was inspired in August 2020 after an international team of astronomers announced they had detected traces of phosphine, a simple molecule associated with living organisms, in Venus’s atmosphere. Rocket Lab’s mission will seek to confirm that finding.

Rocket Lab will also co-lab with Nasa on the US space agency's 2024 "Escapade" mission to place two Rocket Lab-made spacecraft into orbit around Mars to study its atmosphere. Image / Supplied

The following year, 2024, two Rocket Lab-designed and built Photon spacecraft are due to be put in orbit around Mars as part of a Nasa mission to study the Red Planet’s atmosphere - and how most of it was lost.

Nasa hasn’t put a price tag on the “Escapade” Mars operation yet, but has said that, like Capstone (for which Rocket Lab was paid around $14m), the public-private effort will be delivered for a fraction of the cost of typical interplanetary missions.