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Odysseus’ unmanned Intuitive Machines moon landing nearly failed because of a single safety switch.
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Other moon landing attempts have crashed or burned due to leaking valves or software glitches.
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Their photos show how even the smallest details make a big difference in space flight.
Landing on the moon is so difficult that, until last year, only three nations had ever made it without crashing. Recently, India, Japan, and one private company – Intuitive Machines – joined their ranks.
Thursday’s Intuitive Machines moon landing was particularly significant, returning the US to the lunar surface for the first time in nearly 52 years and bringing the first commercial spacecraft to the moon.
But the mission narrowly avoided the same fate as several previous lunar landing attempts: death through a minor engineering error.
The Houston-based company’s uncrewed Odysseus lander was almost lost because of one of the smallest possible mistakes. A safety switch that should have been turned off before launch was left on, effectively disabling the navigation system intended to guide the robot to a safe landing site.
With less than two hours to go before landing, Intuitive Machines engineers whipped up a new navigation system. They reprogrammed the spacecraft to use the laser technology from the NASA experiment it was carrying to the moon. The experiment wasn’t meant to land the spacecraft, but it worked in a pinch.
At the last second, however, the lander tipped over and settled on its side. That doesn’t seem to be related to the faulty safety switch.
“Spaceflight is hard. A million things have to go right, and if one thing goes wrong, you can still fail,” said Trent Martin, vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, in a NASA press briefing in January , weeks. before Odysseus sailed.
In fact, several robotic lunar landing attempts have crashed or otherwise malfunctioned over the past few years. Overall, only about 50% of lunar landing missions are successful.
In all recent cases, the failure comes down to small engineering details — a million steps, only one going wrong. Photos from those missions show how important the little things are in spaceflight.
Astrobotic’s lander may have succumbed to one exhaust valve
Sometimes all it takes is a small piece of subpar hardware to kill a moon landing.
Just a month before Intuitive Machines won, Astrobotic – another US company working with NASA to reach the moon – failed.
Just an hour after launch, the Astrobotic Hawk lander began leaking fuel. When he took his first photo back to Earth, it showed the lander’s insulation shrinking.
Astrobotic said the most likely cause was a failed re-bleed valve in the fuel tank system. That small failure was enough to drain the lander’s fuel, cause the disintegration in the photo, and ultimately derail the mission.
Landing on the moon was impossible, Astrobotic decided, so the Falcon burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead.
3 lunar crashes show how time is being compressed in the last ’15 minutes of terror’
Especially in the final stages of descent, there is almost no room for error in lunar land.
That’s what India learned from its first attempt to land on the moon, in 2019. The Vikram lander crashed into the moon because it decelerated faster than its braking system was programmed to accommodate, SpaceNews later reported.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) later found Vikram’s remains scattered across the lunar surface.
In those final stages, a spacecraft is completely alone. Mission operators have no time to respond to fresh data from the spacecraft, write new commands, and send them back to the moon.
“Time gets really compressed,” Robert Braun, the space exploration lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, previously told Business Insider. “There’s very little margin for trying something again if it doesn’t go as planned.”
That’s why Kailasavadivoo Sivan, who was the director of India’s space program at the time, called this last phase “15 minutes of terror.”
Last year, the Japanese company ispace lost its lunar lander in the final stages, just a few miles above the lunar surface, due to a software glitch. LRO also saw that lander in pieces:
“When you start a landing sequence, you’re committed. It’s like jumping out of a plane,” Braun said. “Your parachute must be working.”
The Beresheet lander, owned by Israeli non-profit SpaceIL, nosedived freely during the critical final stages of its 2019 landing. A single computer command led to a cascade of technical glitches that caused its main engine to fail. LRO saw his wreckage, too:
The Japanese moon landing was a major failure
of Japan Smart Lander to Investigate the Moon (SLIM) recently experienced a major malfunction – with a twist.
One of the lander’s two main thrusters failed as it was descending, causing the spacecraft to fall. He survived the chaotic fall, and managed to deploy the two tiny rovers he was carrying.
But a photo from one of the rovers later showed that the lander had landed upside down.
That left its solar panels away from the sun, disrupting the spacecraft’s energy generation and leaving it with little battery power to operate for much of its mission.
The SLIM case shows that sometimes exceptionally strong hardware and software engineering, along with a healthy dose of luck, can help a lander do its job despite an error or two.
Likewise, Intuitive Machines’ success on Thursday shows that small errors don’t have to spell the end of a mission.
“Space is hard, and equipment doesn’t always work as expected,” Braun told Business Insider after Odysseus landed. “In this case here, engineers on the ground came up with an ingenious way to keep the mission on track and actually complete the landing.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
