A crippled US spaceship has been lost over a remote region of the South Pacific, probably burning up in the atmosphere in a fiery end to its failed mission to land on the moon.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander was launched on Jan. 8 under an experimental new partnership between NASA and private industry intended to reduce costs for US taxpayers and seed a lunar economy.
However, it experienced an explosion shortly after separating from its rocket and had been leaking fuel, damaging its outer shell and making it impossible to reach its destination.
Photo: AP
In its latest update, Astrobotic posted on X that it had lost contact with its spacecraft shortly before 9pm GMT on Thursday, indicating a “controlled re-entry over open water” as it had predicted.
The Pittsburgh-based company said it would await independent confirmation of Peregrine’s fate from government authorities. A previous update provided atmospheric re-entry coordinates a few hundred kilometers south of Fiji, albeit with a wide margin of error.
Engineers had executed a series of small engine burns to position the boxy, golf cart-sized robot over the ocean to “minimize the risk of debris reaching land.”
Photo: AFP
Astrobotic also posted on social media platform X a photograph taken by the spaceship on its final day, revealing the Earth’s crescent as it positioned itself between the sun and our planet.
Peregrine operated for more than 10 days in space, exciting enthusiasts even after it became clear Astrobotic would not succeed in its goal to be the first company to achieve a controlled touchdown on the moon — and the first US soft landing since the end of the Apollo era, more than five decades ago.
NASA had paid the company more than US$100 million under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to ship its science instruments to the moon, as it prepares to send US astronauts back to the barren world later this decade under the Artemis program.
Astrobotic also carried more colorful cargo on behalf of private clients, such as the DNA and cremated remains of about 70 people, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke.
Though it has not worked out this time, NASA officials have made clear their strategy of “more shots on goal” means more chances to score. The next attempt under Commercial Lunar Payload Services, by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, launches next month.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home