The Odysseus Spacecraft Celebrates the First Day of Lunar Life: On Thursday, 15 February, the United States Returns to the Moon
On 15 February, Odysseus went directly for the Moon from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It transmitted images of the Earth and the Moon after firing its engine more than a dozen times. It entered lunar orbit on Feburary 21 and proceeded to attempt a landing after 92 kilometres above the surface.
There was a lot of drama on Thursday evening, as the Odysseus spaceship was to be landed in a small crater not far from the south pole of the moon. NASA declared victory about 20 minutes after touchdown, and some questions remained about the health of the lander. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.
The exact state of the spacecraft remained unclear immediately after its landing, which occurred at 5:23 p.m. Houston time. But it was sending a faint signal back to mission control in Houston, indicating that at least some portion of it had survived the touchdown. “Odysseus has found its new home,” said mission director Tim Crain as the control room burst into cheers.
The landing provides a major shot in the arm for the United States and commercial endeavors to return to the Moon. NASA paid for much of the private mission and is counting on companies such as Intuitive Machines to help ferry equipment and scientific instruments to the Moon in preparation for returning astronauts there.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that the US has returned to the moon. “Today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships.”
Launching Odysseus, a commercial lunar payload service with methane-based propellants near the Moon’s south pole
The first images from the lunar surface are expected within a few hours of the landing, depending on how communications with the spacecraft go. If Odysseus’s scientific payloads check out successfully, they could collect data for up to seven days, until night falls at the landing site and there is no more solar power left for operations.
Five of the last nine Moon landing attempts have failed. Among the failures is a mission launched last month by Astrobotic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which ran out of fuel within hours of launch due to a valve malfunction. But also last month, the Japanese space agency succeeded in putting its SLIM lander near Shioli crater near the Moon’s equator, although the spacecraft landed upside down.
The mission’s engines were fired to descend to a lower altitude and it then moved through a series of maneouvres to look at craters and boulders. It navigated towards its intended landing site and fired its engines again to slow its descent, ultimately touching down on the surface.
The six-legged, phone-booth-sized spacecraft landed near the Malapert A crater, around 300 kilometres from the lunar south pole. NASA would like to find out if the Moon’s south pole contains Ice that could provide fuel and other resources for future lunar explorers. Most lunar landers have visited the Moon’s central regions, but the only mission that has landed near the south pole is India.
Odysseus is the second launch, after Astrobotic’s attempt, in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which aims to incentivize small aerospace companies to fly payloads for NASA and others to the Moon at low cost. NASA paid $118 million for the development of Odysseus, which is less than the cost of a typical mission.
Odysseus is the first craft to burn an alternative rocket fuel in space. Methane-based propellants are more efficient and environmentally friendlier than conventional rocket propellants such as those including kerosene. They need to remain at extreme cold temperatures, making it more difficult to work with. Several other aerospace companies are planning to use methane fuels in the future.
Odysseus, the NASA Spacecraft, Mission Control, and Intuitive Machines: Can It Really Work? The Case of the Spacecraft on the Moon
After the touchdown, mission controllers knew it would take a while to get a signal back from the landers, which wasrelaying signals to large satellite dishes. First one, then two, and then five minutes passed with an increasingly uncomfortable silence in the mission control room for Intuitive Machines. Nothing.
The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. Software was hastily written and shipped up to the landers. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?
The 15-kilogram package contains three small cameras and is part of the navigation Doppler Lidar experiment. NASA tested out technologies that could be used to improve navigation systems in future landings on the moon.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.
But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.