Spacecraft successfully lands on the Moon, the first US mission in more than half a century – 2024-02-24 11:21:03

On Thursday, February 22, an American spacecraft landed on the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years, specifically since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972and also became the first manufactured by a private firm to reach the natural satellite.

After a journey of more than a million kilometers, The Odiseo module, from the company Intuitive Machines, landed successfully around 5:23 in the followingnoon on Thursday the 22nd.US Central Time (23:24 GMT), on the edge of the Malapert A crater, regarding 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole, and following a couple of changes in the arrival time.

“Houston, Odysseus has found his new home,” confirmed the mission director, Timothy Crain, following a few minutes in which communication was lost and the controllers did not receive a signal from the ship.

“Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the United States has returned to the Moon,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, shortly following Odysseus’s descent was confirmed.

The landing process was not without setbacks. As reported during the broadcast, the Intuitive Machines tool that was going to be used for guidance during the descent did not work and the company was forced to use a NASA instrument.

The US space agency has spent US$118 million for the transport of scientific instruments and technological content contained in six payloads, which are part of the twelve loads that the company’s Nova-C series module carries in total.

Photograph provided by the company Intuitive Machines showing an image achieved by the Odysseus module. (Free Press Photo: EFE/ Courtesy Intuitive Machines)

The ship, 4.3 meters high and weighing 675 kilos, took off in the fairing of a Falcon 9 rocket from the company Space seven days.

On Wednesday, February 21, Odysseus successfully entered lunar orbit and remained at an altitude of regarding 90 kilometerswhere it remained until the descent on Thursday the 22nd, but not before sharing an image of the Bel’kovich K crater, “in the northern equatorial highlands of the Moon,” as Intuitive Machines noted.

For the landing process, which took regarding an hour, Odysseus needed to start his main engine for regarding ten minutes, which uses liquid oxygen and methane propellants, and rotates in order to get upright to perch on six legs.

In Malapert A, where temperatures of more than 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit) are recorded during the day, Odysseus will remain for approximately seven days until night falls in this region and it becomes inoperable.

The Odysseus module, from the company Intuitive Machines, which took off from Florida on February 15 with NASA experiments, became the first American spacecraft to reach the moon in more than fifty years. (Free Press Infographic: EFE)

The mission, called IM-1, is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which is also part of the Artemis program with which the US space agency plans to return to send crewed trips to the Moon.

Part of this program was the Peregrine cargo module, which took off successfully last January, but the ship suffered a fuel leak and ended up making a return trip to the Earth’s atmosphere for controlled destruction.

In the case of Odysseus, in addition to the NASA instruments, the module carries with it commissions from private clients, including the sports clothing and accessories company Columbia, which will test insulating material, and the plastic artist Jeff Koons, who has put into the ship 125 tiny sculptures of the lunar phases.

Among the variety of NASA instruments carried by Odysseus, there are some for better fuel measurement, as well as cameras to capture sound and still images of the dust column produced by the module as it begins its descent to the lunar surface.

The area where the module landed this Thursday, February 22, is one of the thirteen candidate regions for the lunar landing of NASA’s Artemis III manned mission, scheduled for September 2026.

The space agency believes that in this unexplored region there might be deposits of frozen water.

The Intuitive Machines mission seeks to consolidate a path to bring NASA scientific instruments to the Moon, as well as commercial cargo, and in this way pave the way for a sustainable human presence on that natural satellite.

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