A private construction spacecraft is falling aimlessly into a deep space, with little hope of being able to contact its native planet. Odin is about 270,000 miles (434,522 kilometers) away from Earth, on a silent trip that goes anywhere quickly.
The Startup based in California Astroforge launched its Odin spacecraft on February 26 in a Spacex Falcon 9. The probe went to a small asteroid to scan in search of valuable metals, at the service of the ambitious objective of the asteroid mining company for profit. Astroforge also hoped to become the first company to launch a commercial mission to Deep Space with its internal spacecraft, a dream that crumbled shortly after the launch.
After Odin separated from the rocket, the company’s main terrestrial station in Australia suffered important technical problems due to a rupture of the energy amplifier, delaying Astroforge’s first planned attempt to contact the spacecraft, the company revealed In an update on Thursday. The mission was downhill from there, since several attempts to communicate with Odin failed and the whereabouts of the spacecraft was unknown. “I think we all know that hope is fading as we continue the mission,” said Astroforge’s founder Matt Gialich. shared In X.
Astroforge is working on the development of technologies for mining of precious asteroid metals to millions of miles away. The company launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine the asteroid material in orbit. His initial task was not as planned either, since the company fought to communicate with its satellite.
For his second mission, Astroforge chose to build his spacecraft internally to avoid some of the problems found during his first mission, Gialich told Gizmodo in an interview last year. Astroforge built the $ 3.5 million spacecraft in less than ten months. “We know how to build these trades. These have been built before. They simply cost one billion dollars. How do we do it for a cost fraction? Gialich is summoned by saying in Astroforge’s recent update. “At the end of the day, as, you have to appear and take a chance, right? You have to try. “
And they try. “With the continuous attempts to command Odin for 18 hours per day, we were not seeing additional signs of commands received, preventing us from establishing communications,” Astroforge wrote in the update. “We use the most sensitive spectrum recorders and communicate with additional dishes to ensure that we were not only losing the weak calls of Odin, but in vain.”
The team also contacted observatories and amateur astronomers to try to track Odin, but the spacecraft was too weak to detect with smaller telescopes. “I wish we would have achieved all the way, but the fact that we reached the rocket, deployed and made contact in a spacecraft in which we build 10 months,” is incredible, “is incredible,” Gialich wrote Thursday in X.
Astroforge is still planning to launch its third mission, Vestri. The spacecraft is designed to travel to the asteroid near the company Target of the company and a dock with the body in space. The Vestri spacecraft will also develop internally, and is scheduled for the launch at the end of 2025, hooking a trip with the third mission of intuitive machines to the moon. “This is a new border, and we had another chance with Vestri,” Gialich added.