6
votes
Accepted
What makes CAPSTONE-1's eight hydrazine thrusters so "super small, high-performance"? How do they work without any tank pressurization?
An exhaustive 42 seconds of googling reveals this on Stellar Exploration's website:
As part of early R&D for a NASA funded deep space nano-satellite mission we have designed, built, and tested a ...
- 164k
5
votes
Accepted
Is there a fairly detailed outline of CAPSTONE's "highly efficient ballistic lunar transfer trajectory" from LEO to lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit?
Advanced Space has a great webpage detailing Ballistic Lunar Transfers (BLT) with links to numerous papers/presentations about BLTs. They all seem to refer back to Advanced Space's CTO Dr. Jeffery ...
- 9,435
4
votes
Accepted
Could the Electron launch a cubesat to Mars
Updating this answer in light of this paper released by Rocketlab 3 months ago for the Decadal survey. And it has a lot on the deep space capabilities of Electron + Photon, not just Venus and Mars.
...
- 3,931
3
votes
Accepted
After CAPSTONE inserted to "highly efficient ballistic lunar transfer trajectory" by Lunar Photon; to what separate orbit for its safe disposal? How?
In a Scott Manley video interview with Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck they show this high level Con Ops poster about the CAPSTONE mission:
Video cued at 30:30 where ...
- 9,435
3
votes
Accepted
How many cubesat U's is CAPSTONE really?
Yes, it's a 12U "base" with a protruding antenna and related equipment. It's quite a custom spacecraft because it'll be demoing the Cislunar Autonomous Position System (among other things ...
- 6,080
2
votes
Accepted
How many times will the Photon fire its Curie in order to "reach the right spot" to deploy CAPSTONE towards the Moon?
With the most recent update by Rocket Lab, posted on various social media including Facebook on Friday 1 July (about five minutes prior to this answer being written!), Photon will perform a total of ...
- 238
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible