Odysseus, the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century, neared a mission-ending slumber on Wednesday, six days after a lopsided touchdown that hindered its operation, though NASA and the company behind the vehicle cheered its performance as a success.
Despite persistent difficulties in communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA said it managed to extract some data from all six of its science payloads delivered by Odysseus, built and flown by Texas-based Intuitive Machines.
“We have conducted a very successful mission at this point,” Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus told a joint news briefing with NASA officials on Wednesday.
He said the flow of information retrieved from the spacecraft increased substantially after “sporadic” communications during the first few days.
Sue Lederer, a NASA project scientist, described the stream of data as going from “a cocktail-size straw to a boba-tea-size straw of data.”
More precise estimates of how much research data and imagery were collected from NASA’s experiments and a half-dozen commercial payloads, and how much were lost, would come later, officials said.
Still, Intuitive and NASA executives hailed the science achieved and the “soft” lunar landing itself – the first ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle – as a key breakthrough in a new chapter of lunar exploration.
Odysseus was also the first US spacecraft to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface since NASA’s final crewed Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.
And it was the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send several more commercial robot landers to the moon on science scouting missions ahead of a planned return of astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite later this decade.
NASA paid Intuitive $US118 million ($A182 million) to design, build and fly Odysseus, a project the company said privately cost about $100 million.
To date, space agencies of just four other countries have put a lander on the moon – the former Soviet Union, China, India and, just last month, Japan, whose own vehicle likewise tipped over sideways. The United States is the only country ever to have sent humans to the lunar surface.
Engineers planned to put Odysseus “to sleep” on Wednesday evening (Thursday AEDT) as the lander ended its sixth day on the moon, once solar power regeneration was no longer sufficient to keep it sending telemetry back to Earth, Altemus said.
A company spokesperson, Josh Marshall, later told Reuters mission operators had decided instead to leave the spacecraft running a bit longer, until its batteries were drained, and letting the lander go dark on its own.
Altemus said flight controllers would seek to restart Odysseus in three weeks, after the sun rises again over the vehicle’s landing site in the moon’s south pole region.
Source: AAP
