Houston-based Intuitive Machines successfully prepared its Odysseus lander for a moon touchdown today. The descent from orbit took one hour and 13 minutes, marking the first U.S.-built spacecraft to achieve a moon landing in over 50 years and the first ever by a private company.
After entering a 57-mile-high orbit tilted 80 degrees to the moon’s equator, Odysseus’ methane-fueled main engine ignited around 3:11 p.m. EST. This lowered the far side of the orbit to a point near the landing site, approximately 186 miles from the moon’s south pole.
As the 14-foot-tall spacecraft descends towards the surface, on-board cameras and lasers scan the ground below to provide steering inputs for the lander’s guidance system to fine-tune the trajectory.
Approximately one hour later, around 4:12 p.m., the main engine is expected to ignite again at an altitude of about 18 miles. It will continue firing for the final 10 minutes of the descent, flipping Odysseus from a horizontal to vertical orientation, descending straight down at just under 4 mph.
As the spacecraft drops below 100 feet, an innovative camera package called “EagleCam,” built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, will fall away and attempt to photograph the lander’s final descent from the side. NASA cameras on board will photograph the ground directly below.
By the time Odysseus reaches an altitude of about 33 feet above the surface, the main engine will have throttled down to the planned landing velocity of about 2.2 mph, equivalent to walking speed for senior citizens. Touchdown near a crater known as Malapert A is expected at 4:24 p.m., one week after launch from the Kennedy Space Center.
Video from the lander’s on-board cameras and the EagleCam cannot be transmitted back to Earth in real time. However, Intuitive Machines’ engineers at the company’s Nova Control center in Houston expect to verify touchdown within about 15 seconds, with the first pictures anticipated within a half hour.
A successful lunar landing by Odysseus would be the first by a U.S.-built spacecraft since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and the first by a privately-built spacecraft. Pittsburg-based Astrobotic aimed to achieve this milestone last month with its Peregrine lander, but the mission was disrupted by a ruptured propellant tank shortly after launch on January 9. Previous private moon ventures by Israel and Japan also ended in failure.
Only the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan have successfully landed on the moon’s surface. Japan’s “SLIM” lander was only partially successful, tipping over on touchdown on January 19. Both Peregrine and Odysseus were funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS), designed to promote private industry development of transportation capabilities for lunar missions.
NASA’s objective is to stimulate the development of new technologies and collect data essential for Artemis astronauts planning to land near the moon’s south pole later in the decade. The agency paid Astrobotic $108 million for its role in the Peregrine mission and an additional $129 million for the Odysseus instruments and transportation to the moon.
What’s on board the Odysseus moon lander?
Odysseus carried six NASA instruments and six commercial payloads, including small moon sculptures by artist Jeff Koons, cloud storage technology, Columbia Sportswear insulation blankets, and a small astronomical telescope. Among the NASA experiments are instruments to study the charged particle environment at the moon’s surface, test navigation technologies, and capture images of the lander’s engine exhaust disrupting the soil at the landing site.
Also included is a sensor using radio waves to accurately measure cryogenic propellant levels in space, a technology valuable for future moon missions and deep space travel. Odysseus and its instruments are expected to operate on the lunar surface for about a week until the sun sets, after which the lander will shut down as it is not designed to survive the extreme cold of the lunar night.
