In February 2025, NASA lost contact with the Lunar Trailblazer probe. A year later, the aerospace administration announced the reason for the mission’s failure.
The Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin for NASA as part of the SIMPLEx program. It cost $72 million. The device was designed to search for and map water ice deposits on the Moon, as well as to determine the mineralogical composition of its surface. To accomplish these tasks, Lunar Trailblazer was equipped with two infrared spectrometers.
Lunar Trailblazer was launched on February 27 on a Falcon 9 rocket along with several other interplanetary missions. Unfortunately, they all encountered significant problems. The Athena probe, built by Intuitive Machines, tipped over during its landing on the Moon, while Astroforge’s Odin spacecraft lost contact shortly after launch and was lost in deep space.
As for Lunar Trailblazer, contact with it was also lost shortly after launch. NASA made attempts to reestablish communication, but they were unsuccessful. And now, a year later, the organization has revealed the reason for the mission’s failure. The problem lies with the spacecraft’s software. Due to a coding error, instead of pointing the solar panels toward the Sun, Lunar Trailblazer turned them in the opposite direction. As a result, the device was left without power, which doomed it to destruction.
According to the NASA commission investigating the cause of the failure, Lockheed Martin did not conduct adequate software testing prior to the launch of the spacecraft. This problem could have been solved after launch, but due to other software glitches, it proved to be extremely difficult and ultimately impossible.
In its statement, Lockheed Martin attributed the loss of the spacecraft to the fact that relatively “inexpensive” (by space industry standards) missions involve high risks. At the same time, it is clear that the software problem could have been easily identified during testing — however, perhaps for reasons of cost, testing was never carried out.
According to npr.org
