As we wrap up an active week for CAPSTONE, and happy to report the spacecraft is healthy and everything is operating nominally. We want to give a big thank you to everyone involved. To Rocket Lab, thank you for the launch and successful separation from Photon. To NASA, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL), thank you for the support during our troubleshooting and resolution. And a big thanks to our teams at Terran Orbital’s Mission Operations Center, NASA’s DSN, and our own team in our Advanced Space Operations Center. Plus, we appreciate the well wishes from customers, industry partners and friends.
One more maneuver is planned for tomorrow morning, July 9th, to wrap up this first trajectory correction of the ballistic lunar transfer that will deliver CAPSTONE to the Moon! As of 3:20pm MT, the spacecraft was approximately 561,000 km from the Earth (~15.7 times further than the GEO belt and ~177,000 km further than the Moon).