By 
March 5th, 2025
Artwork depicts on-duty Lunar Trailblazer. Image credit: Lockheed Martin
A water-scouting Moon orbiter has been in trouble since its deployment February 26 as a ride share payload atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster.
Ground controllers for the NASA/Caltech-led Lunar Trailblazer have valiantly been trying to re-establish communications with the small satellite.
“Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state,” explained NASA is a statement.
The team will continue to monitor for signals “should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication,” said NASA.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer is seen at SpaceX’s payload processing facility within NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Fueled and attached to an adaptor used for secondary payloads, the small satellite rode along with another Moon mission, the Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 lander due to make a lunar touchdown this week.
Image credit: SpaceX
Precluded TCMs
NASA’s Deep Space Network is in use, along with ground-based observatories to better understand Lunar Trailblazer’s orientation.
But Lunar Trailblazer’s woes have also precluded the execution of post-launch trajectory correction maneuvers, or TCMs – small thruster operations to adjust the small spacecraft’s flight path.
Ideally, future TCMs would put the probe into its planned science orbit around the Moon.
“The team is now working to define alternative TCM strategies that could be used after reacquiring communications and establishing normal spacecraft functionality,” the NASA statement points out. “These alternative TCM strategies may be able to place Lunar Trailblazer in lunar orbit and allow it to complete some of its science objectives.”
Image credit: Lunar Trailblazer Team
Patrol mode
Lunar Trailblazer is designed to circuit the Moon in patrol mode to detect signatures of ice in reflected light, pinpointing the locales of ice or water trapped in rock at the Moon’s surface.
Mission operators at Caltech’s Lunar Trailblazer in Pasadena, California, did establish communications with the small satellite as expected following deployment.
However, the team subsequently received engineering data indicating intermittent power system issues. They lost communication with the spacecraft Thursday morning at about 4:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Several hours later, the spacecraft turned on its transmitter.
Reporter Leonard David in Lockheed Martin clean room gets up-close view of Lunar Trailblazer before launch.
Image credit: Barbara David
Curio platform
Lunar Trailblazer was developed and built by Lockheed Martin, with the aerospace firm also integrating the craft’s science instruments.
The spacecraft weighs a modest 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and measures 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide when its solar panels are fully deployed.
“We’ve been working closely with our partners at NASA JPL and Caltech throughout the mission,” said Lockheed Martin in a statement provided to Inside Outer Space. “Our spacecraft team onsite and our mission operations team in Denver are advising the Caltech-led flight operations team with solutions. We’re dedicated to the health and safety of Lunar Trailblazer and its mission.”
Lunar Trailblazer utilized the aerospace company’s new Curio platform. Curio is a scalable smallsat spacecraft architecture, designed to aid deep-space exploration and to probe scientific questions in a cost-efficient way.
Higher risk posture
In a NASA-provided statement to Inside Outer Space, the space agency-approved life cycle cost for the mission is price-tagged at $94.1 million.
Lunar Trailblazer was a selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition.
“To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management,” NASA explains. “This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies.”
For more information on this eagerly-awaited mission, go to my pre-launch Space.com story – “SpaceX to launch water-hunting moon probe ‘Lunar Trailblazer’ on Feb. 26” — at:
Posted in Space News
From the published images of the spacecraft, and the description of the power issue, it looks like Lockheed Martin’s Curio bus was designed without keep-alive solar panels on all the faces of the bus — a well-known design feature that is used by many skilled spacecraft designers, to preclude exactly this type of “death mode.” (The Odin asteroid exploration spacecraft that launched with Lunar Trailblazer looks to have exactly the same design flaw, and is suffering the same death-mode issue.) Fingers crossed for Trailblazer to recover its attitude to the point that it can become power-positive again. But LM might want to revisit their Curio bus design, to scrub out the death-mode design features…