Meet CAPSTONE, a NASA mission set to be the first satellite to operate in a near rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon.

Because NASA loves acronyms, CAPSTONE stands for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment.

It is a small, 12-unit CubeSat that weighs only 25 kg.

It will test and verify the predicted orbit the international lunar Gateway space station will use later this decade.

CAPSTONE will also test a navigation system that will measure its position relative to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter instead of using ground stations on Earth.

For its flight, CAPSTONE will show future Artemis mission planners the behaviors of a spacecraft in a near rectilinear halo orbit, how a spacecraft gets into that orbit and then stays there, and how location-relative navigation with the Moon will work.

CAPSTONE will spend three months cruising to its near rectilinear halo orbit after launch.

Image: CAPSTONE payload. Credit: NASA/Dominic Hart

Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1A (LC-1A) on the Māhia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island is part of the company's first launch site, with another under construction at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia.

An isolated location, the Māhia launch site hosted its first orbital launch attempt of Electron in May 2017 and its first successful orbital launch in January 2018.

Together with Rocket Lab's third launch pad in Virginia, their launch sites can support up to 132 Electron launch opportunities every year.

The Māhia location has two launch pads (LC-1A and LC-1B) and two separate integration hangers to permit simultaneous and protected processing of two payloads for flight at the same time.

LC-1A is the original pad at the Māhia site, with LC-1B launching its first mission in February 2022.

Photo: Rocket Lab