Intuitive Machines’ personal lander was accidentally discovered on its way down to the lunar surface, possibly resting against a lunar rock. The vehicle is still operational and flight engineers are working to gather more data about the less-than-ideal location, the company said.
Odysseus It landed on the moon on Thursday, overcoming a flaw that jeopardized its ability to land safely. Although it was revealed on the surface, Odis Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said at a news conference Friday that the landing wasn’t all that smooth, with one of the vehicle’s legs getting caught and causing it to fall on its side and land on a rock.
“Yesterday we thought we were right.” Altemus said. “When we worked through the night to obtain other telemetry data, we found that in this direction [pointing downwards] That’s where we’re looking at the tank residue, and that’s what tells us in fairly certain terms the direction of the vehicle.”
“Going to the moon was a pretty tough seven-day mission,” Altemus added. He wasn’t wrong. Intuitive Machines was racing to the lunar surface to become the first private company to land on the moon after a series of failures by other companies. In January Astrobotic failed. The Peregrine spacecraft suffers from a valve problem while attempting to reach the moon. April 2023, Japan’s iSpace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the moon’s surface, Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet Lander It met a similar fate in April 2019.
This time the moon still put up a fight. Just a few hours before the scheduled descent, OdysseusA laser rangefinder designed to evaluate the lunar terrain to identify a safe landing site malfunctioned. To guide the lander to the surface, flight engineers uploaded a software patch that repurposed the secondary laser of the onboard NASA instrument. Odysseus.
The Houston-based company seemed to have broken the Moon Curse with Thursday’s touchdown, even though it wasn’t entirely perfect. According to Altemus, it can operate on the Moon with the lander on its side, with its horizontal solar arrays still receiving sunlight and all active payloads facing the surface.
Intuitive Machines has obtained a faint signal from the lander, but is still waiting for more data to be linked down from the lander. Odysseus. However, some of the antennas the lander was designed to use to communicate with Earth are pointed downward, limiting the mission’s data transmission capabilities.
The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to have a continuous flow of civilian landers headed to the Moon to deliver government-owned and commercial payloads. As each individual journey to the moon begins, NASA and its partner companies collect data to feed into the next mission.
“When the lander comes down, ideally we want the lander to come down right away,” Prasun Desai, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said at a news conference. “But there was an error in the operation of the system and it ended up going sideways…[we’re trying to] You need to understand the lateral movement so the system can counteract it and zero out the lateral movement to bring it down vertically.”
Odysseus It is designed to operate on the lunar surface for about a week, or until the sun sets over the moon’s south pole region. Intuitive Machines hopes that the lander’s solar panels will receive enough sunlight from their current location to power the lander for the next few days.
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