CAPSTONE is still going strong after more than six months in lunar orbit.
CAPSTONE, built and operated for NASA by the Colorado company Advanced Space, was designed to help lay the foundation for the future Gateway space station, which will orbit the moon as part of the Artemis program.
In the NRHO, CAPSTONE gets as close as 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) to one lunar pole during a near pass and then as far away as 43,500 miles (70,000 km) from the other pole every seven days. The microwave-sized satellite imaged the lunar surface for the first time on May 3, as it made a close pass by the north pole.
Six days later, the CAPSTONE team used the cubesat to test navigation technology similar to GPS on Earth called the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS).
During the successful May 9 experiment, CAPSTONE teamed up with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been circling the moon since 2009. CAPSTONE beamed a signal to LRO, which bounced it back to the tiny spacecraft, where it was converted into a measurement of the distance and relative velocity between the two probes.
It hasn't been all smooth sailing for CAPSTONE since its launch atop a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle on June 28, 2002. The mission team had to troubleshoot issues with the tiny probe's communications and propulsion systems, for example, before getting it successfully into lunar orbit on Nov. 13, 2022.
NASA says that the current "enhanced mission phase" of CAPSTONE will last for around a year and will see the spacecraft continue testing its onboard technology.