Spaceflight Now by Stephen Clark December 11, 2022
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral early Sunday with a commercial Japanese robotic moon lander and a NASA hitchhiker micro-payload called Lunar Flashlight that will seek out signs of water ice hidden in the permanently dark floors of craters at the moon’s poles.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 launcher departed from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:38:13 a.m. EST (0738:13 GMT) Sunday, a week-and-a-half after SpaceX grounded the mission to resolve an unspecified problem with the rocket. SpaceX rolled the rocket back into its hangar for troubleshooting after calling off a Nov. 30 launch attempt, then returned the Falcon 9 to the pad for Sunday’s countdown.
The commercial Hakuto-R moon lander, developed by a Japanese company called ispace, will attempt to become the first privately-developed spacecraft to accomplish a soft landing on the lunar surface. Lunar Flashlight will fly to the moon on its own trajectory, eventually settling into an orbit that will repeatedly take the spacecraft as close as 9 miles (15 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole on the hunt for signs of water ice.
The launch Sunday occurred about 10 hours before the scheduled splashdown of NASA’s Orion crew capsule to wrap of a 25-day unpiloted test flight to the moon and back, and occurred on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 landing on the last visit of astronauts to the moon.
Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines delivering 1.7 million pounds of roaring thrust powered the Falcon 9 rocket high into the sky over Cape Canaveral. The launcher headed east over the Atlantic Ocean, surpassed the speed of sound in less than a minute, then shut down its first stage engines about 2 minutes and 13 seconds into the flight. A few moments later, the booster stage broke free of the Falcon 9’s upper stage, which ignited a single engine to continue the climb into orbit.
The reusable booster, designated B1073 and making its fifth flight to space, reversed course with a retro-rocket engine firing and flew back to Cape Canaveral for a successful touchdown at Landing Zone 2, one of SpaceX’s two seaside rocket recovery pads about 6 miles (10 kilometers) south of the Falcon 9’s launching stand. The landing was the second time SpaceX has recovered a rocket onshore at Cape Canaveral in less than three days, following the launch and landing of a Falcon 9 booster Thursday on a mission carrying internet satellites into orbit for OneWeb.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage placed the Hakuto-R and Lunar Flashlight payloads into a low-altitude parking orbit less than eight minutes after liftoff. At T+plus 40 minutes, with the rocket soaring over Africa, the upper stage reignited for a nearly minute-long firing to propel the payloads on a trajectory to escape the grip of Earth’s gravity and head into deep space.
The Hakuto-R spacecraft, about the size of a compact car, deployed first from the rocket about 47 minutes into the mission. Live video from a camera on-board the rocket showed the moon lander separating from the Falcon 9. Six minutes later, SpaceX confirmed NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft had spring-ejected from a deployment mechanism on the upper stage.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led development of the Lunar Flashlight mission, quickly confirmed ground teams received the first signals from the moon-bound spacecraft. Video from the Falcon 9’s on-board camera appeared to show ispace’s Hakuto-R spacecraft extended its four landing legs a few minutes after separation from the rocket, but ispace did not immediately verify whether mission controllers at the company’s Tokyo headquarters had established contact with the lander.
More:
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/12/11/falcon-9-ispace-mission-1-live-coverage/
