The Mun proves to be a challenging target as Celestia II missed it and shot off into the solar system. The idea of the mission was to capture images of the far side of the Mun for the first time. But an incorrect burn caused the probe to miss its target. Although it successfully flew behind the Mun, it failed to then return to Kerbin to send the images it had captured.
A model of Celestia II performing am attitude thrustering test
However, once Mission Control realised that their probe was not on a return course for Kerbin, they tried to send the data anyway. Most of the imagery was far from clear, but the best example is shown below.
Far side of the Mun from Celestia II
A project spokesman commented:
'We miscalculated a burn due to a faulty booster. We had already missed one transfer causing Celestia II to be stuck in orbit around Kerbin for over a day before the next window. After we knew the probe would not return to a good communication range to transmit the images, we tried to capture the data anyway. Although nothing solid can be concluded from the images, we suspect the far side of the Mun to be quite similar to the side we always see.'
The mistake from Mission Control sent Celestia II and it's booster on an orbit around the Sun, making them the first objects launched from Kerbin to have a heliocentric orbit. The probe continued to send data for three days until it fell out of communication range, destined to forever orbit our star.
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