by The Odysseus lunar lander is side by side on the moon, Intuitive Machines, the company that built the vehicle, said during a news conference on Friday.
The revelation comes after Intuitive Machines first described Odysseus, also known as “Odie” or IM-1, as “just” in an update posted on the social media platform X immediately after the historic mission touch the surface of the moon on Thursday. But the company’s CEO, Steve Altemus, said later data showed the spacecraft likely tipped on its side after catching one of its legs on a moon rock.
“We think it came down (moving) about 6 miles an hour this way, and about 2 miles an hour (horizontally along the surface) and took a foot in the surface, and the lander has fall like this,” Altemus said, using his miniature model of the lander to demonstrate the suspected issue during a news briefing.
Altemus said there is only one piece of Odysseus’ cargo on the side of the spacecraft looking down toward the lunar surface: A piece of art sent to the moon by one of Intuitive Machines’ commercial customers.
The CEO also emphasized that the spacecraft was still in a stable condition, with its solar panels absorbing sunlight and fully charging its batteries. Already, some experimental technology payloads from NASA have been put to the test, checking out some key mission objectives.
‘Punch in the stomach’
Notably, Intuitive Machines realized before he fell that Odysseus had a faulty piece of navigational equipment. And the company chose to bypass the broken pieces and use an experimental NASA instrument that happened to be on board: The Navigation Doppler Radar, or NDL, developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center.
Altemus said learning about the issue “was like a punch in the stomach — that we were going to lose the mission.”
The company’s engineers had to work essentially as hackers, looking for a way to find data from NASA’s NDL – which was intended to be a simple demonstration flight – in the hope that it could save the mission.
The hack eventually worked, and the spacecraft made it to the lunar surface in operational condition. No other US spacecraft had made a soft landing on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, and no commercial spacecraft before Odysseus had achieved such a feat.
The space agency and Intuitive Machines are still working to determine whether Odysseus can achieve all of its science objectives, according to Joel Kearns, the associate deputy administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“We’re evaluating to see: Are there any measurements yet to come from any of the NASA-supplied payloads that probably aren’t possible especially because of this new orientation?” Kearns said.
The spacecraft has some issues with the speed and consistency with which they can collect data from Odysseus.
What does this mean for mission success
The US space agency, as the main financial backer of the mission, has celebrated the mission as a major victory.
“This is a huge accomplishment,” Kearns said Friday.
The spacecraft “traveled not only to an area where we landed earlier – decades ago near the equator with the Apollo missions – but in the unusual territory of the south (lunar) pole, which is the focus of our human Artemis missions future,” Kearns said, referring to NASA’s efforts to return astronauts to the moon as early as later this decade.
Intuitive Machines is still working to assess exactly how much work Odysseus can do on the lunar surface and confirm the spacecraft’s physical state after its unexpected crash.
“We’re hoping to get pictures and really assess the structure and assessment of all the external equipment,” Altemus said.
The company has yet to share images captured by the spacecraft while on the moon, although it did reveal a shot taken by the lander as it approached the lunar surface on Thursday. Intuitive Machines also plans to deploy a device aboard Odysseus called EagleCam, which could capture an image of the spacecraft from afar, Altemus confirmed Friday.
All told, Odysseus will likely be able to spend about nine days operating on the lunar surface, according to Tim Crain, chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines. This is a slightly longer projection than the company offered in a pre-launch fact sheet, which suggested Odie would have “around seven days”.
“You’ll bring a tear to my eye,” Crain said when asked how long the spacecraft will operate on the lunar surface.
After nine days, “the sun will move beyond our solar array in any configuration,” Crain’s said. “When the sun hits Odie, the batteries will try to keep the vehicle warm and alive but eventually it will catch a cold. And then the electronics we produce won’t survive the deep cold of a moonlit night.”
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