Flight control engineers lost contact with the U.S. commercial lunar lander Odysseus on Tuesday and expect the mission to be aborted five days after its side landing, said Intuitive Machines, the company that developed the spacecraft. announced.
It remains to be seen how much scientific data will be lost as a result of Odysseus’ shortened lifespan, but previous estimates from the company and its biggest customer, NASA, suggest that Odysseus will remain on the moon for 7 to 10 days. It should have been in operation. .
The company predicted an early end to the mission ahead of last Thursday’s landing as new details emerged about test shortcuts and human error that led to an in-flight failure of the spacecraft’s laser-guided range finder. Body.
Intuitive Machines officials said the loss of the rangefinder was due to the company’s decision to halt pre-launch test firings of the laser system to save time and money on pre-flight inspections of Odysseus at NASA’s Kennedy. Said to be due to. Florida Space Center.
“There were certainly things that could be done to test and actually launch,” Mike Hansen, the company’s head of navigation systems, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. “It was very time consuming and very expensive. I guess.” “So we recognized that it was a risk as a company and we took that risk.”
On Friday, Intuitive Machines said a laser rangefinder designed to send altitude and forward speed readings to Odysseus’ autonomous navigation system was discovered to have failed because its engineers forgot to unlock the laser’s safety switch before launch. It was revealed that it became inoperable. February 15th. A safety lock is similar to a firearm safety switch and can only be manually disabled.
A rangefinder failure detected just hours before final descent forced flight controllers to improvise an experimental workaround to avoid a catastrophic forced landing.
Hansen, the engineer who created a software “patch” to fix the problem, said the spacecraft may have been helped by an improvised navigation solution using an experimental system provided by NASA on the lander. The company said it has not yet decided whether to do so. €™s sideways landing.
In its first post-landing press conference on Friday, the company said that during its final descent, Odysseus caught the bottom of one of its six landing gear on a bump in the moon’s surface and fell, coming to rest horizontally on a rock. Announced.
Intuitive Machines executives speculated that the stumbling block may have been because the spacecraft was traveling about twice as fast as expected during landing. However, it remained unclear whether the use of the original laser rangefinder made a difference.
In any case, Odysseus’s sideways position greatly limited the amount of sunlight the solar panels needed to charge the batteries were exposed to. Additionally, the company announced Friday that two of its antennas were pointed toward the ground, preventing communication with the lander.
Intuitive Machines executives said at the time that the company’s engineering team needed more time to assess how it would impact the overall mission.
In an update posted online Monday, the Houston-based company said “flight controllers will collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light.” Based on the positions of the Earth and the moon, flight controllers believe he will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning, five days after landing.
NASA said the vehicle carries multiple research instruments and these payloads are designed to run on solar energy for seven days before sunset at the landing site near the moon’s south pole. Ta.
Company executives told reporters Friday, the day after Odysseus landed, that the payload would be able to function for about nine to 10 days under a “best-case scenario.”
Intuitive Machine stock plunged 35% on Monday.
Despite a less-than-ideal touchdown, Odysseus landed on the moon in 1972 when astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt landed on NASA’s last manned Apollo mission to the moon. It was the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since then.
It was also the first-ever landing on the moon by a commercially built and operated spacecraft, and was the first in the past decade to land astronauts on Earth’s natural satellite before a Chinese-owned manned spacecraft landed. It was also the first landing on the moon under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to bring the astronaut back home. There.
Intuitive Machines announced it spent about $100 million on the lander and received $118 million from NASA under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Landing Services Program. The program is a low-budget effort to stimulate competition for commercial flights to the moon.
