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Updated Friday, January 19, 2024-08:42

  • Space The Peregrine mission fails in its goal of reaching the Moon after running out of fuel

  • Peregrine The ship that failed to land on the moon will return to Earth this Thursday to disintegrate

The

American lunar landing module Peregrine

, which could not reach the

Moon

due to a fuel leak during the flight, disappeared this Thursday over a remote region of the South Pacific, probably after catching fire upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Astrobotic

, the start-up that designed the device, lost contact with the ship shortly before 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, mid-Friday morning in the local time zone, indicating a "controlled re-entry over open water," it says. the company in its most recent update on the social network X.

The Pittsburgh-based company added that it would wait for independent confirmation of Peregrine's whereabouts from relevant government authorities.

An earlier Astrobotic report provided atmospheric re-entry coordinates

a few hundred kilometers south of Fiji

, albeit with a wide margin of error.

Engineers had executed a series of small engine burns to position the square, golf-cart-sized robot over the ocean to "minimize the risk of debris reaching dry land."

The company had also published

a photograph of the darkened Earth

taken from the module as it approached the planet.

Peregrine took off early last week from Florida, but a fuel leak was quickly detected, preventing it from landing on the moon.

However, it continued to operate for more than 10 days in space, collecting useful flight data for a future attempt and even allowing onboard experiments.

The company was forced to evaluate how to

end the mission

taking into account the uncertainties related to the leak and to not cause problems for satellites in Earth orbit or debris in lunar orbit.

This weekend he announced that he had made "the difficult decision" to maintain a trajectory that would direct the lander toward Earth.

"We do not believe that Peregrine's re-entry poses any safety risk and the spacecraft will burn up in Earth's atmosphere," Astrobotic had noted.

The lunar landing module is part of a new experimental partnership between the US space agency (NASA) and private industry aimed at reducing costs for taxpayers and seeding a lunar economy.

NASA had paid the startup more than $100 million under the "Commercial Lunar Payload Services" program to send its scientific instruments to the Moon.