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Odysseus, the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the Moon in half a century, lost power and became inactive Thursday as it entered a frigid lunar night, ending its primary mission after a bumpy landing a week ago that hampered its operations and scientific objectives.
Intuitive Machines, the Texas-based aerospace company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly Odysseus, said its ground control team had received a final “farewell transmission” from the spacecraft before it darkened in the south polar region of the moon.
“Good evening, Odie. We look forward to hearing from you again,” Intuitive said in an online update, referring to the spacecraft by the nickname its engineers had affectionately adopted for a lander they said turned out to be sturdier than the expected.
Earlier in the day, Intuitive said its teams would program Odysseus to “call home” to the company’s ground control center in Houston if the spacecraft receives enough solar energy to wake up in three weeks with the next sunrise over its landing place.
The company previously said Odysseus would likely run out of battery power sometime Wednesday night, just after its sixth full day on the moon, as the sun sank below the lunar horizon and solar power regeneration stopped. became insufficient.
But Intuitive said Thursday morning that Odysseus was “still kicking” and that flight controllers would attempt to download a final stream of data transmitted 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) to Earth before contact was lost.
Intuitive’s stock, which had nearly tripled and then plunged in big swings over the course of the mission, was up about 20% from just before launch, giving the company a market value of around $600 million. of dollars.
The six-legged Nova-C-class lander, shaped like a hexagonal cylinder and standing 4 m (13 ft) tall, was launched Feb. 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket supplied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It reached lunar orbit six days later.
The vehicle reached the lunar surface last Thursday after an 11-hour navigation error and a thrilling descent that ended with Odysseus trapping one of his feet in the ground and landing in a highly inclined position, immediately preventing its operations.
Intuitive Machines has said that human error was to blame for the navigation problem. Flight preparation teams had neglected to manually unlock a safety switch before launch, preventing subsequent activation of the vehicle’s laser-guided rangefinders and forcing flight engineers to hastily improvise an alternative during lunar orbit. .
The last-minute fix likely prevented a hard landing, but may have contributed to the vehicle landing crooked, apparently catching a foot on the uneven surface and coming to rest by tilting at a 30-degree angle, company officials said.
An image released Wednesday showed the spacecraft landing on the surface, with its landing gear visibly damaged.
The company has said that two of the lander’s antennas were out of service and that its solar panels were also facing the wrong direction.
Despite persistent difficulties communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA said it managed to extract some data from its six scientific payloads delivered by Odysseus.
Intuitive and NASA executives praised the science achieved and the “soft” lunar landing itself, the first by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle, as a key advance in a new chapter of lunar exploration.
Odysseus was also the first American spacecraft to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface since NASA’s last manned Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.
And it was the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send several more commercial robots to the Moon on scientific exploration missions before astronauts’ planned return to Earth’s only natural satellite later this decade.
To date, the space agencies of only four other countries have achieved a “soft” moon landing: the former Soviet Union, China, India and, last month, Japan, whose lander also flipped on its side.
The United States is the only country that has sent humans to the lunar surface. (Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Lisa Shumaker and Lincoln Feast)
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