The hexagonal craft landed near the moon’s south pole
Washington:
A Houston-based company has landed America’s first spacecraft on the moon in more than 50 years, part of a new fleet of NASA-funded, unmanned commercial robots intended to pave the way for astronaut missions later this decade.
But while flight controllers confirmed they had received a weak signal, it was not immediately clear whether Odysseus, the lander built by Intuitive Machines, was fully functional.
The hexagonal ship touched down near the moon’s south pole at 2323 GMT, traveling at a speed of 6,500 kilometers per hour.
Images from an external “EagleCam” that would shoot out of the spacecraft during the final seconds of descent could be released.
However, for now, nothing is certain.
“No doubt our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” said Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer. “So congratulations IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get from that.”
An earlier moonshot from another US company last month ended in failure, raising the stakes to demonstrate that private industry has what it takes to repeat a feat that US space agency NASA last achieved during the manned Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The current mission “will be one of the first forays to the South Pole to actually look at the environmental conditions of a place where we will send our astronauts in the future,” said Joel Kearns, a senior NASA official.
“What kind of dust or dirt is there, how hot or cold does it get, what is the radiation environment? These are all things you would really like to know before you send out the first human explorers.”
Moon south pole
Launched on February 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Odysseus features a new type of supercooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane propulsion system that allowed it to race through space in a short time.
The landing site, Malapert A, is an impact crater located 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the moon’s south pole.
NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence there, harvesting ice for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.
Instruments Odysseus carries include cameras to investigate how the moon’s surface changes due to a spaceship’s engine plume, and a device to analyze clouds of charged dust particles hanging above the surface at dusk due to solar radiation.
It also features a NASA landing system that fires laser pulses, measuring the time it takes for the signal to return and its change in frequency to accurately assess the spacecraft’s speed and distance from the surface, to provide a prevent catastrophic impact.
This instrument was intended for demonstration purposes only, but Odysseus ultimately had to rely on it for the entire descent phase of his journey after his own navigation system stopped working – forcing controllers to upload a software patch to make the switch.
Exclusive club
The remainder of the shipment was paid for by private customers of Intuitive Machines and includes 125 stainless steel mini-moons by artist Jeff Koons.
There is also an archive created by a non-profit organization that aims to leave backups of human knowledge throughout the solar system.
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship its hardware under a new initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which it created to delegate cargo services to the private sector to realize savings and stimulate a broader lunar economy.
The first CLPS mission, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but the Peregrine spacecraft suffered a fuel leak and was ultimately returned to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Spaceships landing on the moon must navigate treacherous boulders and craters and, lacking an atmosphere to support parachutes, must rely on thrusters to control their descent. About half of more than fifty attempts fail.
So far, only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan have achieved this feat, creating an exclusive club.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)