by Odysseus, the first US-built spacecraft to land on the moon in more than 50 years, could exceed expectations and still send back vital scientific data weeks beyond its operational period seven to 10 initial planned days, mission managers said Wednesday. .
The lander, carrying NASA equipment that analyzes the moon’s surface, will be put into sleep mode in the coming hours when its solar panels will no longer receive sunlight at the start of a week-long “lunar night”, they said at a press conference in the evening. Houston.
Wednesday or Thursday was expected to see the final transmission from the Nova-C Lander, designed and built by Houston-based commercial aerospace company Intuitive Machines.
But Intuitive Machines co-founder and chief executive Steve Altemus told reporters there were plans to try to relaunch the spacecraft in a few weeks when sunlight returned. If successful, it would be a remarkable revival of a mission that was thrown into uncertainty when Odysseus went sideways during a touchdown last week.
“The mighty plucky lander did an amazing job, all the way to the moon and then on the surface to deliver so much data and information and science back to NASA and our commercial companies,” he said.
“It’s just an incredible testament to how strong and, as someone said, how fierce that little spaceship is.”
Altemus said the revival effort could come when sunlight again illuminates the solar panels “in the next two to three weeks.”
“Can we, will we, get a signal back from this lander? We’re excited about that,” he said.
The 14-foot (4.3-meter) hexagonal craft made history last Thursday when it became the first private spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon, and the first US mission since then the last Apollo mission in 1972.
Odie landed on the rocky and crater-rich lunar surface near the moon’s south pole that NASA is targeting for its next crewed landing mission, Artemis III, planned for late 2026, as Intuitive Machines employees know the lander lovingly.
Its payload, a suite of NASA equipment designed to collect data on the lunar environment, including analyzing potential sources of water that would help sustain a future lunar base, was feared to have been compromised by the faulty landing.
But Altemus said the data obtained proved it had been “a very successful mission so far”.
He said: “What we have done during this mission is that we have fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the moon.
“We have opened the door to a strong cislunar economy in the future. It’s a point in history that we should celebrate, as we move on to other missions around the moon.”
The IM-1 mission was carried out as part of NASA’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) program, in which the agency pays “seed money” to private companies to develop hardware and software that can be used for Artemis missions.
NASA paid $118m to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding another $130m before it was launched on February 15 from the Kennedy space center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
At a separate press conference in Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, two days before SpaceX Crew 8 astronauts are scheduled to fly to the international space station aboard another Falcon rocket, NASA administrator Bill Nelson praised the CLPS program.
“We leverage the few little nickels we have by getting the commercial industry to foot part of the bill. They are producing a moon economy as they continue to grow and experiment and invent,” he said.
“A good example of how we are sharing the cost of the entire exploration program as we go back to the moon, not only with commercial partners, and that is certainly true in the Artemis program, but with international partners.
“There are significant international investments in each of the steps as we go back to the moon, so this is all about using what we can get out of Congress and doing more with him.”
Even with the additional funding, however, the Artemis program is still billions of dollars over budget and several years behind schedule. The space agency announced last month that Artemis II, a 10-day mission to send a crew around the moon and back to test life support systems, would be launched no earlier than September 2025.
Meanwhile, Artemis III is due to land four astronauts, including the first woman, near the moon’s south pole, delayed by another year until September 2026.
However, Nelson remained very happy.
“These CLPS missions, before Artemis III ever comes into operation, will be invaluable. All of these [Odysseus] NASA’s instruments are all part of getting additional data that we need,” he said.
Two more Intuitive Machine launches are scheduled for later this year, including an ice drill to extract ingredients from rocket fuel, and another Nova-C lander carrying a small Nasa rover and four small robots that will probe surface conditions.
