Mission #2 for SSTV 01 is now completed with the docking at the N-Port of the Lunar Station. The M-Port is currently occupied by the SSTV 02 which is nearing completion.

After docking with the Lunar Station, a complete review of the 5 damaged EHEs will be performed. Initial pictures taken from the station show damage similar to that experienced by Apollo 13 when its O2 tank exploded.. but on a much larger scale. Before SSTV 02 leaves for Pluto, a more extensive round of long duration...

Our Lunar Orbit insertion burn was performed using a combination of 8 EHEs over the course of 2 hours. It was decided not to use any EHE for more than 30 minutes at a time for a long duration burn. Exactly why our EHEs failed during the Earth Closest Approach burn is still under investigation but preliminary analysis shows that the initial 4 EHEs overheated during the long burn and this caused some sort of explosive event which caused damage to nearby EHEs. This information will be critical to know...

Early this morning we made our closest approach to Earth and with it our Earth Capture burn. This was by far the longest EHE burn of this mission and we had a few issues with 2 of the 4 EHEs chosen for the burn. We were only able to complete the burn by switching to alternate EHEs in mid burn. Currently we have 5 EHEs out of 17 unavailable for future use in this mission due to damage caused by the 2 EHEs failing. Determining exactly what damage was caused and how to fix it will have to wait until...

Phasing burns began today and will continue until we make our lunar insertion burn in 2 weeks time. We are cycling through our collection of EHEs using a different set each burn. After 1 day of burns we have had no issues with any of the EHEs.

These phasing burns are a practice of sorts for the burns that will be made by SSTV-02 when it arrives at Pluto after a 100 day transit from LEO and when it arrives back to the Earth-Moon system again after a 100 day transit from Pluto. The...

MCC #9 was performed with no flags.

Due to our high approach speed to the Earth-Moon system, we will begin 12 days of phasing burns to slow our closest approach speed down while maintaining our correct trajectory to arrive at the Lunar Station in 20 days. Phasing burns are usually 5-10 minutes in duration at 1-1.5 g's followed by an hour or 2 of calculations before the next burn is performed. As the burn calculations are very straight forward, we will continue our existing duty cycles...