US spacecraft lying sideways on lunar surface shares first photos from Moon

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US spacecraft lying sideways on lunar surface shares first photos from Moon

Odysseus sends back its first photos from the far south of any spacecraft ever to land on the Moon

Washington:

An American lunar lander that overturned during touchdown has sent back its first photos from the farthest south of any spacecraft ever to land on the Moon.

The unmanned Odysseus, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, returned the United States to Earth’s cosmic neighbor last week after a five-decade absence, a first for the private sector.

But as he descended, one of his feet caught hold of the surface, causing him to capsize on the final leg of the dramatic journey, which was saved by an improvised correction.

“Odysseus continues to communicate with flight controllers at Nova Control from the moon’s surface,” Intuitive Machines said in an update on X on Monday.

The post included two photos: one of the hexagon-shaped spacecraft landing, and another taken 35 seconds after its fall, which reveals the baked soil of the Malapert A impact crater.

NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon later this decade, and as part of a new initiative to turn cargo missions over to the private sector and stimulate a commercial lunar economy, Intuitive Machines is virtually ready for the mission. Has paid 120 million dollars.

Odysseus carries a suite of NASA instruments designed to improve scientific understanding of the moon’s south pole, where the space agency plans to send astronauts under its Artemis program later this decade.

Unlike Apollo, the plan is to build long-term habitat, harvest polar ice for drinking water and rocket fuel for further missions to Mars.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) probe on Saturday photographed the 4.0-meter (13 feet) long “Nova-C” class lander at a location within 1.5 kilometers (one mile) of its intended landing site .

The student team behind the external camera, which was initially supposed to shoot Odysseus during its descent, said in a weekend update that they remain “optimistic” EagleCam can still be pulled out of the fallen lander and Photographs can be taken from approximately four meters away.

Astronomer and space mission specialist Jonathan McDowell told AFP that Odysseus was lying on his side, so he was not too concerned.

It is “a success with minor footnotes – I’d give it an A minus,” he said, adding that one would “prefer to keep it straightforward, and they certainly have some things in store for future missions,” but overall. Things are moving in the right direction for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

On Friday, Intuitive Machines revealed that its engineers had forgotten to turn on a safety switch that had prevented the spacecraft’s laser-guided landing system from engaging, prompting them to upload a software patch and save the day. Forced to rely on experimental NASA system.

Of the “embarrassing” oversight, McDowell said, “Rocket science is hard not because any one thing is extremely hard, but because you have to do a million simple things.”

Intuitive Machines said flight controllers will continue downloading data until the lander’s solar panels are exposed to light, which is now estimated to be Tuesday morning.

This is a slightly shorter mission duration than initially planned, possibly as a result of the spacecraft’s awkward orientation.

The Japan Space Agency also landed a spacecraft on the moon last month, but on Monday it surprised its SLIM lander by waking up after a lunar night that lasts about two Earth weeks.

McDowell said falling twice may indicate that current generation landers are too heavy and consequently overturn too easily in low gravity, similar to the short-legged squat landers built by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Against of.

Intuitive Machines joined an exclusive club of five countries that have achieved soft lunar landings: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan. Three prior private attempts failed last month, including by another US company, Astrobotic.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)