Written by Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
The unmanned six-legged robotic lander, named Odysseus, touched down around 6:23 p.m. ET (11:23 GMT), company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast about the landing from Intuitive Machines. It was announced at Runo Mission Operations Center in Houston.
The landing ended a harrowing final approach and descent in which problems with the spacecraft's autonomous navigation system surfaced, forcing engineers on the ground to employ an untested workaround at the 11th hour.
It also took some time to reestablish communications with the spacecraft and decide its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) from Earth after expected radio interference.
When contact was finally resumed, the signal was weak and confirmed that the lander had landed, but controllers quickly lost track of the lander's exact status and location, according to the webcast.
“Our equipment is on the surface of the earth. Month, is transmitting, so congratulations to the IM team,” Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain was heard telling the operations center. “Let's see what more we can get out of it.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was quick to hail the feat as a “triumph,” saying, “Odysseus was victorious.” Month”
As planned, the spacecraft was believed to have come to rest in a nearby crater named Malapart A. MonthAccording to the webcast, Antarctica. The spacecraft was not designed to provide live video of the landing, and this video was taken a day after the spacecraft reached lunar orbit and a week after liftoff from Florida.
Thursday's landing was the first controlled descent by a U.S. spacecraft to the moon's surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, which carried the last NASA crew aboard. Month The mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt.
Only four other countries have had spacecraft land on Earth so far. Month – The former Soviet Union, China, India, and mainly recently, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only country to put a man on the moon.
Odysseus carries an array of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several commercial customers and is designed to operate on solar power for seven days before the sun sets over its polar landing site.
The NASA payload will focus on collecting data about space and space weather interactions. Monthsurface, radio astronomy, and other aspects of the lunar environment for future landers and the return of astronauts that NASA plans for later in the decade.
The IM-1 mission is Month Wednesday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk's company SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
dawn of artemis
Odysseus' arrival marks the first “soft landing” on Earth. Month This is a commercially built and operated spacecraft as the United States races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China can land its own manned spacecraft on Earth's natural satellite. This is the first attempt under NASA's Artemis moon program.
NASA aims to land the first crewed Artemis spacecraft at the end of 2026, as part of a long-term mission to the Moon and, ultimately, as a stepping stone to manned flights to Mars. This initiative focuses on: MonthOne reason is that the Antarctic is estimated to have an abundance of frozen water that can be used for life support and rocket fuel production.
A number of small landers like Odysseus are expected to pave the way under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to deliver equipment and hardware to Earth. Month This would be cheaper than the traditional method, in which the U.S. space agency built and launched its own vehicles.
Relying heavily on small, inexperienced private ventures comes with its own risks.
Just last month, another company, Astrobotic Technologies, Inc.'s lunar lander suffered a propulsion system leak en route to Earth. Month This comes shortly after United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan rocket made its debut flight into orbit on January 8th.
The failure of Astrobotic's Peregrine lander marks the third failure of a private company to land on the moon, following ill-fated efforts by Israeli and Japanese companies.
Although Odysseus is the latest star of NASA's CLPS program, the IM-1 flight is considered an Intuitive Machines mission. The company was co-founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, the former deputy director of his NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston and now the company's president and CEO.
The proliferation of commercial space ventures has itself been driven by technological breakthroughs in recent decades.
The Apollo program and the robotic moon probe missions that preceded it marked the dawn of the computer age, before the advent of modern microchips, electronic sensors, and software, and the development of ultralight metal alloys and countless other advances. I flew to A revolution in spaceflight.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sonali Paul and Josie Kao)