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The first American spacecraft to reach the Moon since the Apollo era will likely be on its side after its dramatic landing, the company that built it said Friday, even as ground controllers work to download data and photographs from the robot’s surface. manned.
The Odysseus spacecraft touched down near the lunar south pole on Thursday at 6:23 p.m. Eastern Time (2323 GMT), after a thrilling final descent when ground teams had to switch to a backup guidance system and took several minutes in establishing radio contact after the lander came to rest.
Intuitive Machines, the company behind this first moon landing by a private company, initially posted on social media that its hexagonal spacecraft was upright, but CEO Steve Altemus told reporters Friday that statement was based on misinterpreted data.
Instead, it appears to have caught its foot on the surface and capsized, coming to rest horizontally with its top perched on a small rock, taking some of the shine off an achievement widely hailed as a historic achievement.
A NASA probe called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should be able to photograph Odysseus over the weekend, helping determine its exact location.
Altemus said that while the solar panels were on the upper side, the team’s ability to download data from onboard scientific experiments was hampered due to downward-facing antennas that “cannot be used for transmission back to the Earth, and that’s really a limiter on our ability to communicate and get the right data so we can get everything we need for the mission.”
Due to complications associated with the landing, the decision was made not to trigger an external camera to capture the descent as it occurred, according to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which built the “EagleCam” device.
But the team will still try to deploy it from the ground to try to get an outside image of Odysseus.
improvised arrangement
Odysseus is still considered the first success of a new fleet of NASA-funded lunar landing modules designed to carry out scientific experiments that will pave the way for the return of American astronauts to the Moon later this decade, under of the Artemisa program.
Last month, a Moon launch by another American company ended in failure, raising the stakes to show that private industry has what it takes to repeat a feat last achieved by the US space agency NASA during its manned Apollo 17 mission. in 1972.
To underline the technical challenges, Intuitive Machines’ own navigation technology failed and ground engineers were forced to prepare a fix, hastily writing a software patch to switch to an experimental NASA laser guidance system that was intended to work just as a technology demonstration.
Altemus later revealed that Odysseus’s own laser system did not turn on because someone had forgotten to flip a safety switch before takeoff, which he described as “an oversight on our part.”
Confirmation of the landing was supposed to come seconds after the milestone, but it was about 15 minutes before a faint signal was detected, enough to declare that the spacecraft was in one piece and had accomplished its objective.
Lunar commercial fleet
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to send six experiments under an initiative that delegates cargo services to the private sector in a bid to achieve savings and stimulate a broader lunar economy.
Odysseus also carries cargo for private clients, including a reflective thermal wrap developed by Columbia Sportswear and used to protect the spacecraft’s cryogenic propulsion tank.
The United States, along with international partners, wants to develop long-term habitats at the South Pole, harvesting ice there for drinking water and rocket fuel for future trips to Mars.
The first crew landing under NASA’s Artemis program will take place no earlier than 2026. Meanwhile, China plans to send its first crew to the Moon in 2030, opening a new era of space competition.
The mission was the fourth soft landing attempt by the private sector. Intuitive Machines joins the national space agencies of the Soviet Union, United States, China, India and Japan in an exclusive moon landing club.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated channel.)