After the “Peregrine” capsule missed the goal of the first commercial landing on the moon, it is scheduled to crash in a controlled manner over Earth today. The capsule should burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific around 10 p.m. CET, said the Pittsburgh company Astrobotic. A joint press conference with the US space agency NASA has been announced for Friday.
The private “Peregrine” mission (in German: Peregrine Falcon) took off last week from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida. However, problems arose shortly after take-off: a malfunction in the propulsion system led, among other things, to a fuel leak.
The engineers temporarily managed to stabilize the capsule, but the goal of landing on the moon had to be abandoned. The capsule was supposed to land in February in an area called Sinus Viscositatis (Bay of Stickiness), completing the first – unmanned – US moon landing since the Apollo mission over 50 years ago.
