Multiple Artemis 1 CubeSats Missions End In Failure

Artemis 1's primary mission is complete but it had a secondary mission, to deploy 10 cubesats. All 10 cubesats were deployed just a few hours after launch, but a number of them have encountered problems, a few even lost.

NASA LunaH-Map

NASA's LunaH-Map spacecraft suffered from a failure of its propulsion system in early Jan 2023 causing it to miss its a schedule burn.

Current data suggests that a valve is partially stuck, allowing some propellant through but not enough to generate thrust. Spacecraft engineers are working to correct the problem with onboard heater, hoping this will release the valve.

"The sticking is something we knew about"

Craig Hardgrove, Principal Investigator LunaH-Map at Arizona State University

Prior to launch there were concerns that due to the months of delays, the LunaH-Map's batteries may have drained as they could not be charged after they were secured to the SLS rocket in fall of 2021. The LunaH-Map team only learned the status of the batteries following launch, when the cubesat transmitted its first telemetry back to Earth following deployment. The batteries were at 70% charge, which was within the teams predictions.

Should engineers be able to fix the problem by mid January, the spacecraft can perform a different burn sending it on an alternative trajectory to the moon, arriving in January 2024. If engineers take longer to fix the problem LunaG-Map will miss the moon but still has opportunity to rendezvous with or fly by a near Earth asteroid.

All other spacecraft systems are performing well. Just 5 days after launch when LunaH-Map first flew by the Moon, its neutron spectrometer collected data, confirming the spacecraft would be able to perform the research the teams planned to do.

NEA Scout

NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Scout mission was to rendezvous with a small asteroid in late 2023. As a last attempt to find the satellite following deployment from Artemis 1, NASA send an emergency command in the direction of NEA Scout commanding it deploy its solar sail early. This would have made the cube sat visible to ground based telescopes, but was unsuccessful.

LunIR

Lockheed Martin's LunIR cube sat was built to demonstrate lunar flyby and remote sensing technology. At first deployment ground stations were able to communicate with the cubesat but reported the signal was weak that expected but just weeks later the cubesat later suffered from an unexpected radio signal issue. LM has stated they consider the mission a useful technology demonstration.

BioSentinel

The primary objective of BioSentinel was to develop a biosensor instrument to detect and measure the impact of space radiation on living organisms over long durations beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Shortly after deployment BioSentinel began to tumble. Controllers requested and received emergency use of the Deep Space Network to attempt a emergency command to detumble the spacecraft.

"The team then sent the spacecraft a command to perform a momentum management sequence"

Matt Napoli, NASA AMES Research Center

After a few tense hours for the team, telemetry showed the detumble was successful.

OMOTENASHI

A Japanese cubesat that was set to perform a "semi hard" landing on the moon failed to generate enough power with its solar arrays. The cubesats was declared a loss after communications were lost.

CuSP

A cubesats built by the Southwest Research Institute was set to study solar particles as a demonstrator for a future constellation in a heliocentric orbit. The CuSP hs suffered from communication issues which appear to be because of a battery problem.