Astrobotic’s lunar lander falls into South Pacific after missing out on moon landing

One of the last pictures taken by a camera on the Peregrine lander shows a crescent Earth. (Astrobotic Photo)

Ten days after its launch, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander fell back to Earth today, ending a trip to the moon’s orbital distance and back that was doomed by a propellant leak.

The mission began auspiciously on the night of Oct. 7-8 with a seemingly successful liftoff from Florida on United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket, powered by Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines. But hours after launch, the Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic team detected a problem with the propulsion system. So much propellant was lost that the team had to rule out a moon landing.

After days of troubleshooting, Astrobotic and NASA determined that the best course was to send the 8-foot-wide robotic spacecraft on a looping orbit that went out more than 240,000 miles from Earth — and then came back for a controlled re-entry over a remote area of the South Pacific.

Based on telemetry received during Peregrine’s approach, Astrobotic and NASA said the lander should have re-entered the atmosphere around 1 p.m. PT, with debris projected to fall into the Pacific about 300 miles south of Fiji.

Scott Tilley, who monitors satellite tracking data from British Columbia, reported in a posting to X / Twitter that the spacecraft’s descent appeared to match predictions. Neither Astrobotic nor NASA provided immediate confirmation.

On the final day of the mission, Peregrine sent back what Astrobotic called “a stunning image” of a crescent Earth, captured by one of the lander’s cameras from a distance of more than 30,000 miles.

“The first attempt to take this photo yielded an oversaturated image, with the sun making the image too bright to see the Earth,” Astrobotic said in a posting on X / Twitter. “As a result, the team precisely slewed the spacecraft to reposition the sun to be hidden behind the think payload deck strut just to the left of Earth, which produced the starburst effects on the video and revealed the Earth’s crescent.”

Astrobotic said the image was dedicated “to our customers, partners and team who all stood with us throughout Peregrine Mission One.”

Further details about the end of Peregrine Mission One are to be provided during a briefing planned by Astrobotic and NASA at 10 a.m. PT Friday, and we’ll update this story with information from that briefing.

The Peregrine lander’s primary payload was a suite of NASA science instruments that would have gathered data about the environment around the lunar landing site. Today, the space agency said that “all NASA payloads designed to power on have received power and collected data,” and that observations were made relating to the radiation environment and chemical compounds in the vicinity of the lander during its transit through space.

NASA was due to pay Astrobotic $108 million to deliver its science payloads to the lunar surface, but it’s not clear how much it will end up paying for a mission that wasn’t fully successful.

Peregrine was also carrying more than a dozen non-NASA payloads — including a mini-rover and micro-robots, a “Lunar Library” carrying the equivalent of 60 million pages of information, DNA data archives, memorabilia and capsules of cremated remains. All those payloads were lost during re-entry.

If the mission had been successful, Peregrine would have been the first commercial lander to touch down safely on the moon, and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to make a soft lunar landing since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

The next spacecraft in line to go after those distinctions is Intuitive Machines‘ Nova-C lander, which is due to be launched to the moon’s south polar region on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as early as next month.

As was the case for Peregrine, NASA is paying Intuitive Machines to deliver hardware to the lunar surface under the aegis of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. Another CLPS-supported mission calls for Astrobotic to deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to a landing spot near the moon’s south pole late this year.

This report has been updated to remove references to a tweet about Peregrine’s descent that was later deleted by its author.