2024-02-29 23:54:13
(Automated translation by Reuters, please see disclaimer
(Limited data recovery, first deep space flight powered by methane; two more Intuitive Machine landers planned; Japanese lander awakened) by Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
Odysseus, the first American spacecraft to land on the Moon in half a century, lost power and went into hibernation Thursday as it entered a frigid lunar night, ending its mission one day. week following an unbalanced landing that hampered its operations and scientific results.
Intuitive Machines LUNR.O , the Texas-based aerospace company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly Odysseus, said its ground control team received a final “farewell transmission” from the spacecraft before that it does not go out in the region of the south pole of the moon.
“Good night, Odysseus. We hope to hear from you once more,” Intuitive said in an online update, referring to the spacecraft by the nickname its engineers had affectionately adopted for a lander they say It turned out to be more robust than expected.
Earlier today, Intuitive said its teams would program Odysseus to “phone home” to the company’s ground control center in Houston if and when the spacecraft receives enough solar power to wake up in three weeks with the next sunrise over its landing site.
The company previously said Odysseus would likely run out of battery on Wednesday evening, just following its sixth full day on the moon, as the sun sank low on the lunar horizon and solar energy regeneration became insufficient.
But Intuitive said Thursday morning that Odysseus was “still active” and that flight controllers would seek to download a final stream of data transmitted the 239,000 miles (385,000km) to Earth before contact is lost.
Intuitive’s shares, which had nearly tripled and then fallen sharply during the mission, remained up regarding 20% from where they were just before the launch, giving the company a market value of approximately $600 million.
AN UNBALANCED LANDING
The six-legged Nova-C-class lander, shaped like a hexagonal cylinder and 13 feet (4 m) tall, was launched Feb. 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a Falcon 9 rocket provided by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. It arrived in lunar orbit six days later.
The vehicle reached the lunar surface last Thursday following an eleventh-hour navigation problem and a suspenseful descent that ended with Odysseus catching one of his feet on the ground and landing in a heavily inclined position, which immediately hampered its operations and limited data recovery.
Intuitive Machines said human error caused the navigation issue. 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 a workaround during lunar orbit.
This last-minute solution likely avoided a crash landing, but may have contributed to the vehicle landing sideways, which apparently caught its foot on the uneven surface and came to rest tilting at a 30-degree angle, company officials said.
An image released Wednesday shows the spacecraft with its landing gear visibly damaged as it touched down on the lunar surface.
The company said two of the lander’s antennas had been knocked out of service and its solar panels were also facing the wrong direction.
Despite ongoing difficulties communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA said it successfully extracted data from the six scientific payloads delivered by Odysseus. Other customers with instruments on board have had mixed results.
Nevertheless, Intuitive and NASA executives hailed the scientific results obtained and the “soft” moon landing itself – the first ever achieved by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle – as a major step forward in a new chapter lunar exploration.
Intuitive notably touted the success of the proprietary propulsion system it developed for the lander, the first vehicle whose flight into deep space was powered by a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.
Odysseus was also the first American spacecraft to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface since the last crewed Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.
It’s also the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send several more commercial robots to the Moon for scientific prospecting missions before the astronauts’ planned return to Earth’s only natural satellite at the end of the decade.
Two more lunar robots from Intuitive Machine are expected to launch later this year.
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 landed also knocked down and experienced problems with energy regeneration.
Earlier this week, the Japanese space agency announced that its lander had survived a lunar night and restored communications with Earth a month following being mothballed.
The United States is the only country to have sent humans to the lunar surface.
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