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Add background on the mission at all times; market price
By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
February 26 (Reuters) –Engineers on Earth expect to lose radio contact with the private American lunar lander Odysseus on Tuesday, effectively disrupting the mission five days after its side landing, the company behind the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said. LUNR.Ohe said Monday.
NASA, which has several research instruments aboard the six-legged vehicle, had said those payloads were designed to run for seven days on solar power before the sun set over the landing site near NASA’s south pole. Moon.
Company executives had told reporters on Friday, the next day Odysseus landedthat their payloads could operate for about nine or ten days in the “best case scenario.”
However, the company also acknowledged then that the spacecraft had caught the bottom of one of its legs on the irregular lunar surface on its final descent and had tipped over, coming to rest horizontally, apparently resting on a rock at one end. .
As a result, the exposure of the vehicle’s solar panels to available sunlight, necessary to recharge its batteries, was substantially limited, and two of the spacecraft’s antennas were pointed toward the ground, preventing communications with the lander. , the company said on Friday.
Intuitive Machines executives said then that their engineering teams would need more time to evaluate how the overall mission would be affected.
In a mission status update posted online Monday, the Houston-based company said: “Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light.” “Based on the positioning of the Earth and the Moon, we believe that flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.”
Intuitive Machines shares plunged 35% on Monday, after falling 30% during Friday’s extended trading day following news of the spacecraft’s side-landing.
Despite its not-so-ideal landing, Odysseus became the first American spacecraft to land on the Moon since NASA’s last manned Apollo mission to the lunar surface took astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt there in 1972.
It was also the first lunar landing by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle, and the first under NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to Earth’s moon later this decade, before China lands its own spacecraft there. manned space
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Sandra Maler