by Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander overcame several obstacles during its epic landing last week, including one or more broken legs.
The 14-foot-tall (4.3-meter) Odyssey touched down on the gray dirt near the moon’s south pole on Thursday (February 22), marking the first American lunar landing since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
But Odysseus’ touchdown was a bit rough. Thanks to a problem with its navigation equipment, the six-foot lander came down faster than expected, on a patch of lunar land that was higher than the target landing zone.
“So we hit harder, and sort of skidded along the way,” said Intuitive Machines CEO and co-founder Steve Altemus during a press conference today (February 28).
“The landing gear took most of the load, and we broke one or two legs, maybe, landing gear”, he said.
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Odysseus sat upright for about two seconds, on terrain with a slope of about 12 degrees. The lander then began tipping over, however, eventually coming to rest about 30 degrees from horizontal, Altemus said. He has been slightly off the ground by one of his tanks or other pieces of equipment.
This orientation was far from ideal. He prevented Odysseus from using his high-gain antenna to communicate with Earth, for example, and put his upper solar array in shadow. But Intuitive Machines made the best of the situation, setting up home imagery and science data using Odysseus’ low-gain antennas.
We got our first look at some of those photos today. One of them shows the moment of touchdown, and a broken landing leg is clearly visible.
“This image shows Odysseus’ landing strut performing its primary task, absorbing the first contact with the lunar surface to preserve the integrity of the mission. Meanwhile, the liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine is still spinning, which provided stability. The company believes both insights since this image allowed Odysseus to smoothly glide onto the lunar surface, preserving the ability to return scientific data,” Intuitive Machines wrote in its post on X today which the photo showed.
In another X post today, Intuitive Machines shared a selfie taken by Odysseus just yesterday (February 27).
“Previous attempts to send photos from the landing and days later resulted in unusable images. After successfully transmitting the image to Earth, flight controllers gained additional insight into Odysseus’ position on the lunar surface,” the company wrote.
Such imagery could have been complemented by stunning and unprecedented shots of Odysseus landing from the surface of the moon, if everything had gone perfectly on the day of the landing.
The spacecraft carried a payload called EagleCam, built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The camera system was designed to deploy at a height of about 100 feet (30 meters), and then take photographs of the final stage of the descent. But the mission team decided to keep EagleCam on board due to Odysseus’ navigational problems.
EagleCam was finally deployed today, Altemus said. It is currently sitting about 13 feet (4 m) from Odysseus, but no imagery has come in from the instrument yet. The EagleCam team is working on the issue, “so we’ll see what happens in the future,” Altemus said.
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EagleCam is one of 12 payloads on Odysseus, which launched on February 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Six of those payloads are science experiments or technology demonstrations that NASA has put aboard through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program.
The agency has recovered data from all five of those instruments being powered up, NASA officials said. (The other is a passive laser reflector array designed to help other spacecraft navigate.)
“We’re all very excited now that we’ve gotten a lot of data back from the lunar surface,” Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during today’s briefing.
That data spigot will be turned off today, when Intuitive Machines power up Odysseus — affectionately known as Odie — before the long, cold night of the moon. (It takes the Earth about 27 days to rotate once on its axis, so each lunar night lasts about two weeks.)
Odysseus’ surface mission was supposed to last only a week or two. The night ahead could then kill the Lander, crack its electronics and batteries – or it might not.
“We’ve also overcome challenge after challenge after challenge that we didn’t know we’d be able to overcome, and he’s a scrappy little dude,” Lederer said. “So I trust Odie at this point. He’s been incredible.”
