The Odysseus spacecraft, built and piloted by Texas-based Intuitive Machines, landed near the Moon’s South Pole on Thursday, the first US “soft landing” on the Moon’s surface in more than half a century and the first ever by the private sector, on Friday, the 23rd of February, reports the British broadcaster BBC.
It was the first landing of NASA’s Artemis Moon programme. The last “soft landing” on the Moon by American equipment was in 1972, during the Apollo mission.
The Odysseus spacecraft carried six NASA scientific instruments on board.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated Intuitive Machines on the successful lunar mission and hailed it as a “triumph”. He stressed the importance of NASA’s commercial partnerships, declaring that “the US is back on the Moon”.
A compilation of images taken during the #IM1 Odysseus Lunar Lander’s transfer to the Moon. pic.twitter.com/2sW2NwnVrQ
— Gustav Holst (@__MR_R080T) February 23, 2024
Odysseus landed successfully at 23:23 GMT (01:23 local time), but initially there was no signal from the unmanned six-legged vehicle, which caused concern.
After some time, a weak communication link was established, which raised concerns about the status of the lander. However, after a few hours, Intuitive Machines confirmed that Odysseus was standing upright and transmitting data, including images.
The landing was jointly broadcast by the company and NASA from Intuitive Machines’ mission operations centre in Houston.
Your order was delivered… to the Moon! ?@Int_Machines‘ uncrewed lunar lander landed at 6:23pm ET (2323 UTC), bringing NASA science to the Moon’s surface. These instruments will prepare us for future human exploration of the Moon under #Artemis. pic.twitter.com/sS0poiWxrU
— NASA (@NASA) February 22, 2024
The intended landing site was a crater-like area next to a five-kilometre-high mountain formation known as the Malapert.
It is by far the southernmost point on the Moon ever visited by a spacecraft – 80 degrees south.
According to NASA’s planetary science director Lori Glaze, the region of the Moon where Odysseus landed has deep craters that are permanently in shadow and may contain frozen water. Using lunar ice could reduce the amount of materials needed for space missions. The frozen water could be turned into drinking water and used to produce oxygen and hydrogen for astronauts, improving the prospects for human exploration, Glaze explained.
One of the most important studies involves investigating the behaviour of lunar dust, which inconvenienced the Apollo astronauts by scratching and polluting equipment.
NASA aims to understand how the dust kicked up by the lander during landing settles and settles back to the lunar surface.
Only a few other countries – the Soviet Union, China, India and Japan – have successfully landed a craft on the Moon’s surface.
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