Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus moon lander, coming down faster than expected and moving slightly to one side at the moment of touchdown Thursday, apparently caught a footpad on the lunar surface and tipped over onto its side, officials said Friday.
Telemetry indicates the top of the spacecraft may be resting on a rock or the lander could be tipped over on upward-sloping terrain. But Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said Odysseus is still able to draw power from the sun and send engineering and science data back to Earth.
Engineers are in the process of downloading data and hope to downlink stored images as early as this weekend clarifying the orientation of the 14-foot-tall spacecraft.
“We’re downloading and commanding data from the buffers in the spacecraft and trying to get you surface photos because I know that everyone’s hungry for those,” Altemus said.
In the meantime, all the lander’s active instruments, provided by NASA and commercial customers, are facing away from the lunar surface and should be able to return data as planned. But it likely will take longer than expected given some of the tilted spacecraft’s antennas do not face Earth.
And there’s not much time. Regardless of the tip over, the sun will drop below the horizon at the landing site in a little more than one week, ending power generation by the lander’s solar cells. That was always in the cards.
The spacecraft is not designed to withstand the ultra-low temperatures of the lunar night and while flight controllers will attempt to recontact the probe when the sun rises again, they do not expect Odysseus to answer.
“Three major accomplishments”
All that said, Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, praised Intuitive Machines for its off-kilter but still-successful landing.
“Let me congratulate Intuitive Machines for three major accomplishments,” he said. “The first is for having the first successful soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. The second is for being the first non-government commercial organization to actually touch down safely.
“And the third is for having a touchdown point at 80 degrees south latitude, much closer to the south pole of the moon than any earlier U.S. robotic or human explorers.”
That’s important to NASA, which plans to send Artemis astronauts to the south polar region in the next several years to looks for possible ice deposits while establishing a long-term presence on the moon.
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