'Success' - In second leg of mission, Rocket Lab puts Capstone on path to moon

An artist impresion of Capstone in orbit around the moon. Image / Nasa

Rocket Lab says its first deep-space mission is a success and is now looking ahead to its next interplanetary flights.

A Rocket Lab spokeswoman told the Herald this morning that missions to Venus next year and Mars in 2024 are on track.

Overnight, Nasa's Capstone micro-satellite was put on a path to the moon to test an experimental halo orbit.

Capstone was launched from Mahia into low Earth orbit on June 28 on a Rocket Lab Electron.

The Kiwi-American company then used its Photon spacecraft - or "satellite bus", housed in the Electron's third stage - to lift Capstone into progressively higher orbits over six sets of manoeuvres.

Last night's final burn saw the microwave-size Capstone separate from the Photon and deployed on its ballistic lunar transfer trajectory to the moon. That's a 1.3 million km journey that will take until November 13 and be managed by two US firms: Advanced Space and Terran Orbital (which designed and built Capstone)

Capstone's halo orbit will be a lopsided elliptical path that will take it as close as 1600km to the lunar surface and as far away as 68,260km.

Researchers expect this orbit to be a gravitational sweet spot in space – where the pull of gravity from Earth and the moon interact to allow for a nearly stable orbit.

That allowed physics to do most of the work of keeping a spacecraft in orbit around the moon.

If successful, the same orbit will be used by Nasa's Gateway, a planned small space station that the US space agency intended to use as a staging post for its Artemis programme to return astronauts to the moon's surface.

The Capstone mission, which Rocket Lab carried out for a keen $14 million, also marked an increasingly close relationship between Rocket Lab and Nasa.

Rocket Lab has a number of projects in the pipeline for the US space agency, including a contract (for an as-yet-undisclosed sum) to design and built two Photon spacecraft that will go into orbit around Mars in 2024, after being carried to the red planet by a Nasa-provided rocket.

The mission's aim is to shed light on how Mars lost its once-habitable atmosphere.

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. Photo / Supplied

Rocket Lab also recently won a contract to make a radiation-hardened solar panel array for Nasa's Glide spacecraft, due to launch in 2025.

Glide (an acronym for Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere) will survey the exosphere, the little-understood outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere).

Rocket Lab did not put a value on the Glide contract, but it's part of an ongoing push to diversify its revenue from rocket launches to a lot of business in "space systems" too.

And it was possible because Rocket Lab bought SolAero, a New Mexico maker of solar components, for US$80m ($125m) last December, the fourth in a series of purchases of North American space system makers.

An artist impression of the Photon spacecraft that Rocket Lab will send to Venus next year. It will drop a probe into the planet's atmosphere to support the search for life. Image / Supplied

Beyond its Nasa-backed jaunt to Mars, Rocket Lab has a second interplanetary flight planned: its privately-funded mission to drop a probe into the atmosphere of Venus in a bid to confirm observations that indicated the potential presence of phosphine, a gas typically produced by living organisms.

Scheduled for 2023, it will be the first privately-funded mission to Venus.