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Intuitive Machines’ private lander wobbled while landing on the lunar surface and is possibly resting on a rock on the moon. The company said the vehicle is still operational and flight engineers are working to gather more data on its less than ideal position.
Odysseus It landed on the moon Thursday, overcoming a glitch that jeopardized its ability to touch down safely. Although it made it to the surface, odi’s The landing was not so smooth, with one of the vehicle’s legs getting stuck, causing it to tip over on its side and possibly crash into a rock, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during a press conference Friday.
“Yesterday we thought we were honest,” Altemus said. “As we worked through the night to get other telemetry data, we looked towards [pointing downwards] That’s where we’re seeing the remains of the tank and that tells us a lot about the orientation of the vehicle.
“It was a pretty spicy seven-day mission to go to the moon,” Altemus said, and he’s not wrong. After a series of failures by others, Intuitive Machines was racing to become the first private company to land on the Moon. In January, astrobotic failed While attempting to reach the Moon due to a valve problem in his Peregrine spacecraft. In April 2023, Japan’s iSpace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the lunar surface, and Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet lander A similar fate happened in April 2019 also.
This time, Moon still fought back. Just a few hours before his scheduled landing, Odysseus‘Laser rangefinders, which are designed to assess the lunar terrain to identify a safe landing location, have malfunctioned. To help guide the lander to the surface, flight engineers uploaded a software patch to repurpose a secondary laser on a NASA instrument that is on board. Odysseus,
The Houston-based company broke the lunar curse with Thursday’s touchdown, even if it wasn’t completely perfect. According to Altemus, with the lander on its side, it is still receiving sunlight on its horizontal solar panels, and all of its active payloads are away from the surface and therefore may be able to operate from the Moon.
Intuitive Machines has received a light signal from its lander but is still waiting for more data to be downlinked Odysseus. However, some of the antennas that the lander is designed to use to communicate with Earth are pointed downward, which limits the mission’s ability to transmit data.
The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to support a steady flow of government-owned and private landers headed to the Moon to deliver commercial payloads. With each private trip to the Moon launches, NASA and its partner companies collect data for the next mission.
“As the landers come down, we would ideally like them to come straight down,” Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said during the press conference. “But because there are errors in the operation of the system, you stop going laterally…[we’re trying to] “Understand that lateral motion so the system can counteract it and reduce that lateral motion to zero and come straight down.”
Odysseus It is designed to operate on the lunar surface for about a week or until the sun sets over the moon’s south polar region. Intuitive Machines is hoping that the lander’s solar panels will be able to capture enough sunlight in their current position to power the lander in the coming days.
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