Hasta La Gadget!

A $79 million portion of NASA’s mission to the moon has run into trouble, after a crisis Saturday caused the agency’s lunar impactor spacecraft to burn through over half of its remaining propellant, Spaceflight Now reports. The anomaly occurred when the craft wasn’t in view from Earth, so it continued unnoticed for some time before ground-based antenna picked it up again.

Dan Andrews, the project manager for the Lunar Carter Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) craft, said that the probe burned through 309 pounds of maneuvering fuel while attempting to maintain its orientation in space–leaving precious little margin of error for the remainder of the mission.

“Our estimates now are if we pretty much baseline the mission, meaning just accomplish the things that we have to (do) to get the job done with full mission success, we’re still in the black on propellant, but not by a lot,” Andrews said in the report. The group traced the fault to a sensor that measures LCROSS’s attitude, which kicked over to the main star tracking system for backup and then used up more fuel than anticipated in the process. (Image credit: NASA)