by Intuitive machines ‘Odysseus’s moon, coming down faster than expected and moving slightly to one side at the moment of crash Thursday, a foot pad appears to have caught on the lunar surface and tipped over on its side, officials said Friday.
Telemetry suggests that the top of the spacecraft could be resting on a rock or that the lander could be pushed onto rising ground. But Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said Odysseus is still capable of drawing power from the sun and sending engineering and science data back to Earth.
Engineers are downloading data and hope to download stored images as soon as this weekend to clarify the orientation of the 14-foot-tall spacecraft.
“We are downloading and ordering data from the buffers in the spacecraft and trying to get you surface photos because I know everyone is hungry for those,” Altemus said.
Meanwhile, all of the lander’s active instruments, provided by NASA and commercial customers, are facing away from the lunar surface and should be able to send back data as planned. But it is likely to take longer than expected since some of the spacecraft’s inclined antennas do not face Earth.
And there is not much time. Regardless of the top, 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 a lunar night and although flight controllers will try to contact the probe when the sun rises again, they do not expect Odysseus to respond.
“Three great achievements”
That said, Joel Kearns, NASA’s associate deputy administrator for exploration, praised Intuitive Machines for its erratic but still successful landing.
“Let me congratulate Intuitive Machines on three major achievements,” he said. “The first is the first successful soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. The second is being the first commercial non-governmental organization to make a safe landing.
“And the third is that there is a point of contact at 80 degrees south latitude, much closer to the south pole of the moon than any previous robotic or human probes of the United States.”
That’s important to NASA, which plans to send Artemis astronauts to the South Polar region in the coming years to look for possible ice deposits and establish a long-term presence on the moon.
Odysseus was funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Payload program, which is designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that the agency can then use to transport payloads to the moon.
NASA paid $118 million to Intuitive Machines to transport six payloads to the moon aboard Odysseus.
Launched February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Odysseus broke into orbit around the moon on Wednesday. Flight controllers raised the orbit a little later to correct a small targeting error and were preparing for landing when they encountered problems with a sensor package needed to help fine-tune the trajectory to touchdown.
Luckily for Intuitive Machines, one of the six NASA payloads aboard Odysseus was intended to test a different type of navigation sensor, an instrument called NDL, which stands for Navigation Doppler Lidar.
The NDL system works like radar but captures reflected laser light instead of radio waves to accurately measure a vehicle’s speed, direction and height.
Odysseus was ordered to make an additional orbit of the moon and engineers urgently wrote and tested software patches to integrate NASA’s system with the lander’s navigation algorithms.
“That’s what allowed them to be successful,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told CBS News Thursday night. “It was NASA’s payload that saved the day. (But) don’t take anything away from Odysseus and Intuitive Machines, because this is the first commercial lander to be able to pull off this feat.”
As Odysseus approached his landing site, he went up from a horizontal orientation to a vertical orientation for the final descent to the landing. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to land with a single vertical velocity of 2 mph, about a moderate walking speed.
However, due to the unexpected lateral velocity, engineers believe that one of the lander’s six foot pads hit a rock or got caught in a crevasse, causing the spacecraft to tumble.
Based on telemetry, “it has to be slightly raised off the surface horizontally, so we think it’s on a rock or the leg is in a crack or something to keep it in that attitude,” Altemus said.
The revelation that Odysseus had bumped into him on landing came as a surprise after an overnight update from Intuitive Machines said that telemetry showed the spacecraft was in a straight orientation. Altemus said Friday that that conclusion was based on “outdated data.”
Further analysis of residual propellant and data from inertial measurement units that indicated the direction of gravity revealed that the spacecraft was, in fact, lying on its side.
The landing highlighted the risks faced by any robotic spacecraft attempting to land on unknown terrain and the challenge of autonomous navigation around rocks and other obstacles that cannot be seen from orbit.
A The Japanese lunar explorer the touch down began last month, limiting its ability to complete the planned science agenda. Altemus and Tim Crain, Intuitive’s chief technology officer, were both optimistic that Odysseus could still achieve most of its objectives.
But one expected objective will not be achieved.
An experimental camera system built by students at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, designed to be released before touchdown to capture imagery of the landing during its final descent, was not deployed as planned due to software limitations related to the problem of guidance systems.
The “EagleCam” package will be ejected later, Altemus said, shot off several feet to one side. If successful, the cameras will show Odysseus lying on its side, giving engineers – and the public – the best available views of the spacecraft’s orientation.
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