Odysseus lunar lander flipped on its side during landing, company says | Top Vip News

Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander, descending faster than expected and moving slightly to one side in the landing moment Thursday, apparently caught a footprint on the lunar surface and rolled onto its side, officials said Friday.

Telemetry indicates that the top of the spacecraft may be resting on a rock or that the lander could tip over on upward-sloping terrain. But Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said Odysseus can still extract energy from the sun and send scientific and engineering data back to Earth.

Engineers are in the process of downloading data and hope to download stored images this weekend to clarify the orientation of the 14-foot-tall spacecraft.

“We’re downloading and sorting data from the spacecraft buffers and trying to get photos of the surface because I know everyone is hungry for them,” Altemus said.

Meanwhile, all of the lander’s active instruments, provided by NASA and commercial customers, have their backs to the lunar surface and should be able to send data as planned. But it will probably take longer than expected given that some of the tilted spacecraft’s antennas do not face Earth.

And there isn’t much time. Regardless of the rollover, the sun will dip below the horizon at the landing site in just over a week, ending power generation by the lander’s solar cells. That was always in the cards.

The spacecraft is not designed to withstand the ultra-low temperatures of the lunar night, and although flight controllers will try to contact the probe again when the sun rises again, they do not expect Odysseus to respond.

“Three great achievements”

All that said, Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, praised Intuitive Machines for its off-kilter but still successful landing.

“Let me congratulate Intuitive Machines on three important achievements,” he said. “The first is for having the first successful soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. The second is for being the first non-governmental commercial organization to land safely.

“And the third is by having a landing point at 80 degrees south latitude, much closer to the south pole of the Moon than any previous human or robotic explorer in the United States.”

This is important for NASA, which plans to send Artemis astronauts to the south polar region in the coming years to search for possible ice deposits while establishing a long-term presence on the moon.

Odysseus was partially funded by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Payloads program, designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that the agency can then use to transport payloads to the moon.

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to transport six payloads to the moon aboard Odysseus.

Launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Odysseus entered orbit around the moon on Wednesday. Flight controllers later raised the orbit slightly to correct a slight orientation error and were preparing for landing when they ran into problems with a sensor package needed to help adjust the trajectory to landing.

Fortunately for Intuitive Machines, one of NASA’s six payloads aboard Odysseus was intended to test a different type of navigation sensor, an instrument known as NDL, which stands for Navigation Doppler Lidar.

The NDL system works like radar but captures reflected laser light instead of radio waves to accurately measure the vehicle’s speed, direction and altitude.

Odysseus was ordered to make an additional orbit of the moon while engineers hurriedly wrote and tested software patches to integrate NASA’s system into the lander’s navigation algorithms.

“That’s what allowed them to be successful,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told CBS News Thursday night. “It was a NASA payload that saved the day. (But) let’s not take anything away from Odysseus and Intuitive Machines, because this is the first commercial lander capable of achieving this feat.”

As Odysseus approached his landing site, he rose from a horizontal to a vertical orientation for the final descent to landing. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to land with a purely vertical speed of just 2 mph, about a moderate walking pace.

However, due to the unexpected lateral velocity, engineers believe one of the lander’s six legs hit a rock or became caught in a crack, causing the spacecraft to tip over.

According to the telemetry, “it has to be a little bit elevated off the surface horizontally, so we think it’s on a rock or the foot is in a crevice or something to keep it in that attitude,” Altemus said.

The revelation that Odysseus had rolled over on landing came as a surprise following a late-night update from Intuitive Machines that said telemetry indicated the spacecraft was in a vertical orientation. Altemus said Friday that that conclusion was based on “outdated data.”

Further analysis of the residual propellant and data from inertial measurement units that indicate the direction of gravity showed that the spacecraft was, in fact, resting on its side.

The landing highlighted the risks faced by any robotic spacecraft attempting to land in unknown terrain and the challenge of autonomously navigating around rocks and other obstacles that cannot be seen from orbit.

TO japanese lunar probe It capsized upon landing last month, limiting its ability to complete the planned scientific agenda. Altemus and Tim Crain, Intuitive’s chief technology officer, were optimistic that Odysseus can still achieve most of its goals.

But at least one of the expected objectives will not be achieved.

An experimental camera system built by students at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, designed to be launched before landing to capture images of the lander during its final descent, was not deployed as planned due to software limitations related to the problem of the guidance system.

The “EagleCam” package will be ejected later, Altemus said, shot dozens of feet to the side. If all goes well, the cameras will show Odysseus resting on his side, giving engineers (and the public) the best available views of the spacecraft’s orientation.