NASA ends its lunar flashlight mission

NASA has pulled the plug on its Lunar Flashlight project, which was designed to look for sources of ice on our closest neighbor. The agency has tried, and failed, for the past few months to generate the amount of thrust needed to propel the small satellite to its intended destination. Officials say the problem was likely caused by a build-up of debris in the fuel lines, which prevented the CubeSats from operating to their full potential.

The “briefcase-sized” lunar flashlight first launched in December, and was developed by Georgia Tech students. Once deployed, it was expected to begin a four-month journey to the Moon, after which it would search for surface water ice at the Moon’s permanently-dark south pole. Unfortunately, despite a months-long effort to resolve the issue, the spacecraft will move past Earth and then fly into orbit, but hopefully won’t get too close to the Sun.

Pointing to the success of several components of the project, NASA is choosing to take a glass half-full approach to failure. Goddard Space Flight Center principal investigator Barbara Cohen said it was disappointing, but the mission proved the efficacy of many of the instruments previously used on the satellite. And that researchers “collected a lot of in-flight performance data on the instrument that will be incredibly valuable for future iterations.”