by SpaceX prepared a Falcon 9 rocket for launch early Wednesday to send a commercially built robotic lander to the moon, the first touchdown aimed near the moon’s south pole where NASA’s Artemis astronauts plan to orbit in in a few years.
The flight comes just five weeks after another US company’s attempt to land a privately built spacecraft on the moon failed, the third such commercial setback in a row.
The fourth such mission is set for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center at 12:57 a.m. Wednesday.
If successful, the Odysseus lander, dubbed “Odie,” will land on February 22 about 186 miles from the moon’s south pole using a high-powered 3D-printed main engine that burns liquid oxygen propellants and methane, a first for deep space. mission.
SpaceX made extensive modifications to cool and channel the cryogenic propellants into the Falcon 9’s nose fairing and then into the landing tanks during the rocket’s countdown. Fitting exercises were held late last week to ensure that the system would work as required.
“SpaceX is extremely proud to be a part of this historic private mission to the moon,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, a former NASA manager who now works for SpaceX. “Loading liquid oxygen and liquid methane into the vehicle is not trivial. We modified the second stage of the Falcon to accommodate that. … The Falcon 9 rocket is ready to fly.”
The flight follows the ill-fated Jan. 8 launch of another commercial lunar lander — Peregrine — built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic that suffered malfunction of the drive system shortly after take off. The disaster derailed what would have been the first US moon landing since the last flight of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago.
Builder Odysseus Intuitive Machines of Houston now hopes to claim that honor.
“It’s a very humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines,” said Trent Martin, the company’s vice president of space systems. “The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is an engineering feat that demands exploration of hunger.”
“We are not looking at the challenges ahead,” said Martin. “Any venture into uncharted territory carries risk, yet it is this willingness to accept risk and push beyond our comfort zones that propels us forward and drives innovation. … Now let’s make history .”
Odysseus carries six NASA instruments and six other commercial payloads, including probes, proof-of-concept cloud storage technology, an astronomical telescope and a student camera package that will drop to the surface ahead of the lander to take a photo final.
NASA’s experiments include an instrument to study the charged particle environment on the moon’s surface, another instrument that will test navigation technologies and face-down stereo cameras designed to photograph how the lander’s engine exhaust affects the soil at the landing site.
Also on board: an innovative sensor that will use radio waves to accurately determine how much cryogenic propellant is left in a tank in the unencumbered environment of space, a technology expected to be useful for downstream moon missions and other deep space voyages.
The Falcon 9 is expected to launch the lander on a trajectory to the moon. But getting into lunar orbit and down to the surface will be up to Odysseus and the Intuitive Machines flight control team in Houston.
A key milestone is expected 18 hours after launch when the lander’s main engine is tested, or commissioned, to help controllers calibrate its performance in space. After that, up to three trajectory correction maneuvers are planned to fine-tune its course to the moon.
It will take Odysseus eight days to reach his goal. Flying behind the moon and out of touch with flight controllers, the lander’s main engine will have to fire for seven minutes “in the blind” to put the craft into a circular orbit 62 miles high and carry it over the landing site at 80 degrees. south latitude.
During 12 trips around the moon, flight controllers will check the landing systems before starting the final descent to the relatively flat terrain near a crater known as Malapert A. To ensure a safe landing, the main engine will have to gradually shrinking the spacecraft. 4,000 mph.
The descent will begin with a small rocket burning 75 minutes before landing to lower the low point of the orbit to an altitude of about 6 miles. The spacecraft will then coast for an hour before re-igniting the engine to begin the powered descent to the surface.
Going up through a height of about 18 miles, Odysseus will flip from horizontal orientation to vertical, falling at just under 4 mph. As the spacecraft descends below 100 feet, the “EagleCam” imaging system, built by students at Embry-Riddle University, will descend and attempt to photograph the final descent of the lander from the side.
By the time Odysseus reaches 33 feet above the surface, the main engine will have slowed down to the planned landing velocity of 2.2 mph — walking speed for seniors.
Intuitive Machines says it will take about 15 seconds for flight controllers to verify touchdown. Data recorded during the descent, including photos from the lander’s plume observation cameras and the deployed EagleCam, will later be sent back to Earth.
Odysseus and his experiments are expected to operate for about a week before the sun sets at the landing site, cutting off solar power. The spacecraft is not designed to survive the extremely low temperature of the two-week lunar night.
“Landing on the moon is difficult,” said Joel Kearns, NASA’s associate deputy administrator for exploration. “I think people have seen different attempts at that over the last year, and it’s very tough. There’s no air on the moon, you can’t use a parachute, you have to use rockets (with deceleration) all the way down .”
“Intuitive Machines has picked up some really innovative techniques that they’re (using) in their driving system,” Kearns said. “They’ve got some really neat stuff they’re going to demonstrate. That means they’re doing a lot of things for the first time.”
Only the United States, Russia, China, India and Japan have managed to land on the surface of the moon, and Japan’s membership in that exclusive club has an asterisk: its lander fell “SLIM ” on the January 19 touchdown and failed to achieve. all mission objectives.
Three privately funded lunar landers were launched between 2019 and last January, one from an Israeli non-profit, one from a Japanese company and Astrobotic’s Peregrine. All three failed.
Both Peregrine and Odysseus were funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS (“clips”) program, which is designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that NASA can then use to transport payloads to to the moon
The agency’s goal is to help start the development of new technologies and collect data that will be needed by Artemis astronauts. planning to land near the moon’s south pole later in the decade.
The agency spent about $108 million on its part in the Falcon mission and another $129 million on Odysseus instruments and transportation to the moon.
“These are not NASA missions, they are commercial missions,” said Susan Lederer, CLPS project scientist at the Johnson Space Center. “These commercial companies will be bringing our instruments along for the ride, enabling our investigations through power, data and [communications] for us.
“With the commercial industry comes a competitive environment, which means that our upfront investment becomes much larger in the end. So instead of one mission in ten years, it allows more like with 10 commercial missions to the moon in ten years.”
But the lower cost of the CLPS mission carries higher risks. The lessons learned from Peregrine will be linked to the development of the company’s next lander, due to launch later this year, and other CLPS missions.
“We will be learning from the things that don’t work, testing many technologies, doing experiments at a lower cost and much faster than a traditional NASA mission,” said Lederer. “This will allow us to prepare for Artemis more efficiently.”
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