The return of the United States to the moon half a century after the Apollo program was accompanied by failure. The Odysseus lander crashed while landing on the moon and came to rest on its side. While that didn’t make him completely useless, it did limit his mission. Intuitive Machines, the company hired by NASA for the trip, acknowledged yesterday that the crash would limit the charging time of its batteries and shorten its mission to the moon.
“Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light.” “Based on the position of the Earth and Moon, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odyssey until Tuesday morning,” Intuitive Machines said in a statement providing an update on the mission.
This is two to three days less than originally planned. Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus admitted on Friday that the device “caught its foot on the surface, tilted” and landed on its side. By the time of the moon landing, there was already a long wait that foreshadowed that something was wrong. Even so, the module is functional for at least a few days. Even under the best of circumstances, Odysseus only had a week to operate on the surface before the long lunar night came.
Another device recently shipped from Japan had a similar problem. It also flipped over and came to rest on its side when landing on the moon, but in that case it was unable to use its solar panels and was initially inoperable, without power. On Monday 26. Japan Space Agency advertisement what SLIMas the artifact is called, he made it through the long lunar night and managed to wake up, “Last night an order was sent SLIM and a reply was received confirming that the spacecraft had made it through the lunar night and retained its communication capabilities.
Satellite images provided by NASA taken at an altitude of 90 kilometers show Odysseus on the moon, although little more than a dot is visible. After traveling nearly a million kilometers, the device touched down less than 1.5 kilometers from the planned landing site, Malapert A, using a laser telemetry system that had to be installed shortly before landing when the originally planned system failed.
According to NASA, the lander ended up in a small degraded crater with an inclination of 12 degrees. It’s the closest a spacecraft has ever been to the moon’s south pole. During the descent, Intuitive Machines algorithms detected “nine safe landing sites in the south polar region,” the company said. It is a region that contains permanently shadowed regions that may be rich in resources, including water ice that could be used for future propulsion and life support on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines’ brief did not say whether the experiments with the transported payloads were successfully completed or whether the crash prevented them from being carried out.
Shares of Intuitive Machines fell on the stock market this Monday. They lost 34.62%, which was already expected in Friday’s after-hours trading. The company has other missions under contract with NASA.
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