First U.S. moon landing since 1972 as private spacecraft touches down on lunar surface
First U.S. moon landing since 1972 as private spacecraft touches down on lunar surface
Intuitive Machines's Odysseus lunar lander becomes the first privately-built spacecraft to safely complete a moon landing.
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down on the moon Thursday after a historic, nail-biting descent following a last-minute navigation sensor malfunction, becoming the first U.S.-built spacecraft to stick a moon landing in more than 50 years and the first ever by a private company.
After delaying the final descent by one orbit to press an experimental NASA navigation sensor into service — and to test hurriedly-written software patches to route its data to the lander's flight computer — Odysseus settled to a touchdown at 6:23 p.m. EST near a crater known as Malapert A some 186 miles from the south pole of the moon.
But the spacecraft's condition was not immediately known. Engineers at Intuitive Machines' Nova control center in Houston expected it to take up to two minutes or so to re-establish communications after landing, but the expected signal was not immediately found.
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How's the signal? Did they get that fixed?
They updated the article:
Finally, a faint signal was picked up by a communications antenna in the United Kingdom, indicating the spacecraft had, in fact, survived the touchdown.
"What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting," Mission Director Tim Crain told the flight control team. "So congratulations, IM team! We'll see how much more we can get from that."
And then further down:
But a detailed assessment of the health of the spacecraft and its payloads awaited analysis of telemetry. Finally, two hours after touchdown, the company reported that "after troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface."
After another update, the lander is not in fact upright. They were looking at old data when they said that.
Oh no!!! I'll have to re-read the article 🫤
Not yet, the Q&A they just did said that the problem was that the lander kept switching between two sets of different dishes, constantly resetting the comms system. Looks like the problem was caused because two of the dishes are facing the ground (it tipped over).