by After a nail-biting descent and tense silence from the lunar surface, the United States is back on the moon.
Odysseus, a robotic lander built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, touched down near the moon’s south pole this afternoon (February 22).
It was a landmark moment for space exploration: No private spacecraft had ever landed on the moon before, and an American vehicle hadn’t touched the soft gray dirt since NASA’s Apollo 17 crew landed in December 1972.
“What a victory! Odysseus has reached the moon,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a video message broadcast by the agency immediately after confirming a successful landing. “This achievement is a giant leap forward for all of humanity. Stay tuned!”
Related: Missions to the Moon: Past, Present and Future
Returning to the moon
The moon was a frequent target for American spacecraft during the 1960s and early 1970s. This push didn’t just come from scientific curiosity: Landing astronauts on Earth’s nearest neighbor was seen as a national security imperative, a way to demonstrate technological superiority over their Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. .
The United States put 12 famous astronauts on the surface of the moon during the six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. With the race to the moon thus decisively won, NASA was directed to focus on other goals of its human space flight program – primarily, development and operation of the space shuttle program.
The US launched several robotic lunar probes after the Apollo era; NASA’s Lunar Exploration Orbiter has been orbiting the moon since 2009, for example. But, lies and begins some frustration despite, going back to the surface was not a priority – until recently.
In December 2017, then-President Donald Trump directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon in the near future. This directive led to a broad, ambitious program called Artemis, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the late 2020s — and use the knowledge gained to do so to find astronauts. to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
NASA plans to set up one or more Artemis bases in the south polar region of the moon, which is thought to harbor a lot of water ice. Before sending astronauts there, however, the agency wants to gather more data about this little-explored area — to help find out, for example, how much water there is and how readily available the vital resource is. here to access it.
So, NASA established another program called CLPS (“Commercial Lunar Payload Services”), which books trips for agency science instruments on robotic moon landers built by American companies.
“The goal here is for us to investigate the moon in preparation for Artemis, and really do business in a different way for NASA,” said Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, during a press conference on February 12. “One of our main goals is to ensure that we develop a lunar economy.”
And that’s where Intuitive Machines comes in.
Related: Top 10 images from NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission
Sending NASA science to the moon
In 2019, CLPS selected Intuitive Machines to deliver a batch of NASA science instruments to the lunar surface using the company’s Nova-C lander, which is about the size of a British telephone booth.
After some modifications, the task order was worth $118 million, NASA officials said recently. It covered the conduct of six agency experiments and technology demonstrations on Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission, which the company calls IM-1. That mission features a Nova-C vehicle named Odysseus, after the legendary journeyman hero in Greek mythology.
NASA’s instruments, which cost an additional $11 million to develop, are designed to perform a variety of investigations. For example, one of them, called NDL (“Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing”) used LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to collect data during takeoff and landing. NDL was crucial to today’s landing, as you will see below.
Another instrument was designed to study how spacecraft engine exhaust interacts with lunar dirt and rock. Another will demonstrate autonomous positioning technology, which could be part of a broad GPS-like navigation system on and around the moon.
Intuitive Machines also placed six commercial payloads on Odysseus for IM-1. One of them comes from Columbia Sportswear, which wanted to test its “Omni-Heat Infinity” insulating material in deep space. Another series of sculptures by artist Jeff Koons, there is even a “safe lunar repository” that aims to help preserve humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
Also flying on Odysseus was EagleCam, a camera system built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. EagleCam was designed to deploy from Odysseus about 100 feet (30 meters) above the lunar surface and photograph the lander’s epic landing below. You can learn more about each of the 12 IM-1 payloads here.
Making history
Those 12 payloads were delivered on February 15, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent Odysseus toward the moon. The deep space journey of the landing was short and fairly smooth, although things got sporty towards the end.
Odysseus arrived in lunar orbit yesterday (February 21) as planned. On the home stretch of its landing attempt today, however, the landing handlers discovered that Odysseus’ laser range finders, which allow it to determine its altitude and horizontal velocity, were not working properly. So NASA’s NDL experimental payload team pressed into service for this critical mission, pushing the landing attempt back two hours to put the new plan into action.
This last-minute reaction – which required the team to design a software patch on the ground and upload it to Odysseus – did the trick. At 6:11 pm EST (2311 GMT) today, Odysseus fired its main engine for a critical 11-minute burn that slowed the craft’s descent toward the lunar surface. Then, at 6:23 pm EST (2353 GMT), Odysseus touched down softly near the rim of the Malapert A crater, about 190 miles (300 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole.
However, success was not immediately apparent. It took the IM-1 crew about 15 tense minutes to locate Odysseus’ signal.
“What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” said mission director Tim Crain after that milestone moment. “Odysseus has found his new home.”
If all goes according to plan, the lander and its payload will operate for about seven Earth days on the lunar surface. IM-1 will end when the sun goes down at Malapert A, because Odysseus was not meant to survive the bitter cold of the long moonlit night. (It takes more than 27 Earth days for the moon to rotate once on its axis, so each lunar night lasts about two weeks.)
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IM-1 is part of a new energy march to the moon. For example, Pittsburgh company Astrobotic launched its Peregrine lunar lander last month on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket.
But Peregrine, which also carried NASA payloads through the CLPS program, suffered a crippling fuel leak immediately after deployment from the rocket’s upper stage. The problem prevented the Falcon from going to the moon, and Astrobotic eventually steered it to a controlled death in Earth’s atmosphere on January 18.
Two other private lunar landers have recently orbited the moon – the Israeli Beresheet probe and Hakuto-R, built by the Tokyo company ispace. Still, neither could take the next big step; Beresheet crashed during its landing attempt in April 2019, and Hakuto-R suffered the same fate in April 2023.
National governments are also increasingly shooting for the moon.
Last August, for example, India sent its Chandrayaan-3 robotic mission down near the moon’s south pole. And just last month, Japan landed its own lunar probe, called SLIM. It was the first such success for any nation; they have now joined the moon party, which already includes the Soviet Union, USA and China.
And some of these countries have even bigger lunar ambitions.
The US has its Artemis program, of course. But China aims to put astronauts on the moon by 2030 and is working (with Russia and many other nations) to develop a lunar center later that decade as well. India, meanwhile, has said it wants to put boots on Earth’s natural satellite in 2040 or later.
This planned activity is characterized by some politicians as a new moon race, a competition between the US and China for the right to establish precedents and norms of behavior in the high frontier. However, exploration advocates tend to see the bright side, emphasizing the exploitation of lunar resources that could help humanity expand its footprint in the solar system for the first time.
Either way, the moon is taking a sharper focus on nations and businesses around the world. It will be busier and busier up there.
