1st private spacecraft to attempt to travel beyond the moon appears to be in trouble

The first commercial spacecraft headed beyond the moon is on its way to deep space, but the mission is suffering from unknown issues as the team scrambles to get in contact with the probe.

Odin, a small spacecraft built by U.S. space mining company AstroForge, piggybacked on the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday (Feb. 26) that sent the private Intuitive Machines' Athena lander toward the moon.

The 265-pound (120 kilograms) Odin is designed to obtain imagery of asteroid 2022 OB5 for a follow-up mission, named Vestri, which will aim to land on the asteroid. The missions are part of AstroForge's plans to make space resources available on Earth.

Initially the signs were good for Odin, with AstroForge posting an image of the spacecraft attached to the upper stage in space. The team is, however, still working to understand how the spacecraft is operating.

"We don't fully understand the state of the vehicle," Matthew Gialich, AstroForge co-founder and CEO, said in a video update on the state of the Odin mission posted on X on Friday (Feb. 28). Odin is thought to be in a "sun safe mode," which means the spacecraft is in a thermally safe and power positive attitude.

"We do believe we're in a power-positive state, though we don't have telemetry coming down to confirm that. Hopefully we can get that tonight," Gialich said. The spacecraft is also almost exactly where it was predicted to be, allowing for tracking using high-gain antennas, Gialich added.

The team believes there are two possibilities for the issues. The first is that everything is fine with the spacecraft but there are issues back on Earth, such as AstroForge's ground receivers not being configured correctly. Alternatively, the spacecraft could be in a really slow, uncontrolled tumble, though the team believes it has information to suggest this is not the case.

Next steps, at the time of the update, included sending a command to the spacecraft to turn on a power amplifier, which would then send a high-gain signal back to Earth, providing vital data.

AstroForge is providing a livestream of its operations as the mission progresses. For now, Odin is on its way. "We will be in deep space, and we'll be on the other side of the moon in about two days. And nothing is going to stop us unless we hit something," Gialich said.