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25-02-2024
NEW YORK: The moon lander dubbed Odysseus is “alive and well” but resting on its side a day after its white-knuckle touchdown as the first private spacecraft ever to reach the lunar surface, and the first from the US since 1972, the company behind the vehicle said on Friday.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines also revealed that human error led to a failure of the spacecraft’s laser-based range finders, how engineers detected the glitch by chance hours before landing time, and how they improvised an emergency fix that saved the mission from a probable crash.
Although the Odysseus made it to the surface intact on Thursday, analysis of data by flight engineers showed the six-legged craft apparently tripped over its own feet as it neared the end of its final descent, company officials said at a briefing the next day.
The spacecraft is believed to have caught one of its landing feet on the uneven lunar surface and tipped over, coming to rest sideways, propped up on a rock at one end, said CEO Stephen Altemus, whose company built and flew the lander.
Still, all indications are that Odysseus “is stable near or at our intended landing site,” close to a crater called Malapert A in the region of the moon’s South Pole, Altemus told reporters.
“We do have communications with the lander,” and mission control operators are sending commands to the vehicle, Altemus said, adding that they were working to obtain the first photo images from the lunar surface from the landing site.
A brief mission status report posted to the company’s website earlier on Friday described Odysseus “alive and well.”
The company had said shortly after touchdown on Thursday that radio signals indicated Odysseus, a 13-foot-tall hexagonal cylinder, had landed in an upright position, but Altemus said that faulty conclusion was based on telemetry from before the landing.
Although the lander’s sideways position is far from ideal, company officials said that all but one of its six NASA science and technology payloads were mounted on portions of the vehicle left exposed and receptive to communications, “which is very good for us,” Altemus said.
“We think we can meet all the needs of the commercial payloads” as well, he added.
However, two of the spacecraft’s antennae were left pointed at the surface, a circumstance that will limit communications with the lander, Altemus said.
Also the functionality of a solar energy panel on the top of Odysseus, now facing the wrong way, is uncertain, but a second array on the side of the spacecraft appears to be in working order, and the spacecraft’s batteries had been fully charged, he said.
The uncrewed robot spacecraft reached the lunar surface on Thursday after a nail-biting final approach and descent in which a problem with its navigation system surfaced, requiring flight controllers on the ground to employ an untested work-around to avoid what could have been a catastrophic crash landing. (Int’l News Desk)
