NASA calls time on CAPSTONE after four years of lunar orbit lessons

After four years of operations around the Moon, NASA's CAPSTONE mission has bitten the lunar dust, in a manner of speaking. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched in 2022, with a primary mission to validate the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) intended for NASA's "paused" Gateway space station. Launched in June 2022 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, CAPSTONE had a troubled start to life, briefly giving controllers the s