NASA's brand-new Lunar Trailblazer probe suffers glitch on way to the moon

NASA's Lunar Trailblazer probe could be in trouble.

Lunar Trailblazer launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Feb. 26 alongside Intuitive Machine's Athena moon lander on the IM-2 mission. The 11.5-foot (3.5-meter), 440-pound (200-kilogram) probe was designed to orbit low over the lunar surface to hunt for and map where water might be found in permanently shadowed regions on the moon. While its launch went smoothly, things do not appear to be going well for the spacecraft, according to a NASA update.

Lunar Trailblazer powered up and began transmitting data after launch, but its operators began noticing power issues and subsequently lost communication with the probe some 12 hours after launch. Mission operators at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were able to reestablish contact with the spacecraft hours later, but are still "working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions," NASA wrote in the update.

Lunar Trailblazer was built by Lockheed Martin and carries two sophisticated instruments to help it hunt for lunar water. One, the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM), was designed to map the surface temperature of the moon using infrared light, which could help it map mineral distribution on the lunar surface.

Another instrument aboard the probe, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was designed to measure how much sunlight reflects off the surface of the moon to help it hunt for the chemical "fingerprints" of any water hiding on the lunar surface.

Finding water on the moon is a high priority for NASA as the agency works to establish a sustainable human presence there through its Artemis program. Recent moon-mapping missions have found evidence that water exists in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, the same region where NASA plans to land astronauts with its Artemis 3 mission.

It remains uncertain how much water might be found there, but scientists hope that it could be used to support a human presence on the moon or even be used to produce resources such as rocket fuel.

Another probe that launched alongside Lunar Trailblazer appears to be in trouble. Astroforge, a private company that hopes to one day mine asteroids for precious resources, launched its Odin probe on the same rocket in order to study asteroid 2022 OB5 ahead of a follow-up mission that will land there.

Odin has yet to phone home, and mission controllers "don't fully understand the state of the vehicle," Astroforge CEO Matthew Gialich posted on X on Friday (Feb. 28).