TEXAS – Odysseus, the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century, lost power and fell asleep on Thursday as it entered the frigid lunar twilight, ending its mission a week after an inclined landing that hampered operations and operations. scientific output.
Intuitive Machines ( LUNR.O ), opens a new tab, the Texas-based aerospace company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly with Odyssey, said its ground control team received a final “farewell transmission” from the spacecraft before it went dark. the south pole region of the moon.
“Good night, Odie. We hope to hear from you,” Intuitive said in an online update, referring to the spacecraft by the nickname its engineers have lovingly adopted for the lander, which they say has proven to be more robust than expected.
Earlier in the day, Intuitive said its teams will program Odysseus to “phone home” to the company’s ground control center in Houston if and when the spacecraft receives enough solar power to reawaken in three weeks with the next sunrise over the landing site.
The company had previously said that Odysseus would likely run out of battery sometime Wednesday night, just after its sixth full moon on the moon, as the sun sank low on the lunar horizon and solar energy regeneration became insufficient.
However, Intuitive said Thursday morning that Odysseus was “still kicking” and that flight controllers would try to download the last stream of data transmitted 239,000 miles (385,000 km) back to Earth before contact was lost.
Shares of Intuitive — which nearly tripled during the mission and then fell sharply — remain about 20% higher than just before the launch, giving the company a market value of about $600 million.
ANGLED LANDING
Shaped like a hexagonal cylinder and 13 feet (4 m) tall, the six-legged Nova-C-class lander was launched on February 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket supplied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It arrived in lunar orbit six days later.
The rover reached the lunar surface last Thursday after an 11th-hour navigational and nail-biting glitch that ended with Odysseus catching one foot on the ground and landing in a sharply tilted position, immediately disabling its operations and limiting data acquisition.
Intuitive Machines said the navigation problem was due to human error. The flight teams neglected to manually unlock the 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 work likely prevented an emergency landing, but may have contributed to the vehicle landing sideways, apparently catching a foot on an uneven surface and coming to rest at a 30-degree angle, company officials said. An image released Wednesday showed the spacecraft carrying the lander was visibly damaged when it landed on the moon. The company said the lander’s two antennas were disabled and its solar panels were also facing the wrong direction.
Despite ongoing problems communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA said it was able to retrieve some data from all six of its science payloads delivered by Odyssey. Other on-board customers have had mixed results.
Still, Intuitive executives and NASA hailed the science achieved and the “soft” lunar landing itself—the first ever commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle—as a key breakthrough in a new chapter in lunar exploration.
One of the specific advances offered by Intuitive was the success of a proprietary propulsion system it developed for the lander, the first deep-space vehicle powered by a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Odysseus was also the first US 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 of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send several more commercial robots to the moon on scientific exploration missions before astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth’s only natural satellite later this decade.
Two more Intuitive Machine lunar landers are scheduled to launch later this year. To date, the space agencies of only four other countries have achieved a “soft” landing on the moon – the former Soviet Union, China, India and, just last month, Japan, whose lander also overturned and had problems regenerating power.
Earlier this week, Japan’s space agency said its lander unexpectedly survived a lunar night and re-established contact with Earth weeks after the moon went dormant. The United States is the only country to have ever sent humans to the lunar surface.
