The Odysseus lunar lander is sideways on the moon, company that built it says – CNN

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The Odysseus lunar lander is lying on its side on the moon’s surface, the vehicle’s manufacturer, Intuitive Machines, said in a press conference on Friday.

This revelation comes after Intuitive Machines originally described Odysseus, also known as “Odie” or IM-1, as “upright” in an update. Posted It was posted on social media platform X shortly after the historic mission landed on the moon’s surface on Thursday. But the company’s CEO, Steve Altemus, said subsequent data showed the rover likely got stuck with one foot on a lunar rock and tilted to the side.

“We believe the lander tilted this way because it was moving toward us at about 6 miles per hour, descending (traversing) at about 2 miles per hour (horizontally along the surface), and then setting foot on the surface.” Artemus said. A small model of the lander to demonstrate suspected issues during a press conference.

Altemus said there is only one piece of Odysseus’ cargo, a piece of art sent to the moon by one of Intuitive Machines’ commercial customers, on the side of the spacecraft facing down toward the moon’s surface. That’s what it means.

The CEO also emphasized that the spacecraft remains stable and its solar panels are receiving sunlight to fully charge its batteries. Already, several experimental technology payloads from NASA have been tested and achieved several important mission goals.

In particular, the Intuitive Machines discovered that Odysseus’ navigational equipment was defective prior to descent. And the company chose to bypass the broken debris and use a NASA experimental instrument that happened to be on board, the Navigation He Doppler Radar (NDL) developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Artemus said that when he first learned of the issue, “it was like a punch in the gut. I thought I was going to lose my mission.”

The company’s engineers essentially acted as hackers and had to figure out how to patch in data from NASA’s NDL, which was meant to be a simple demonstration flight, in hopes of saving the mission.

In the end, the hack was successful and the spacecraft reached the lunar surface in operational condition. No American spacecraft had made a soft landing on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and no commercial spacecraft had accomplished such a feat before Odysseus.

The space agency and Intuitive Machines are still working to understand whether Odysseus will be able to achieve all of its science goals, said Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator for exploration in the Science Mission Directorate.

“We’re doing an evaluation to see if there are still measurements from any of the payloads that NASA has provided that we likely won’t be able to perform, especially because of this new direction,” Kearns said. Told.

The spacecraft faces several problems with the speed and consistency of collecting data from Odysseus.

The US space agency, as the mission’s primary financial supporter, celebrated the mission as a major victory.

“This is a huge accomplishment,” Kearns said Friday.

The spacecraft will be “not only in areas where we have landed before, close to the equator on the Apollo mission decades ago, but also in the unusual region of the (moon’s) south pole, which is the focus of the future manned Artemis mission. We have arrived,” Kearns said. He cited NASA’s efforts to return astronauts to the moon as early as later this year.

Intuitive Machines is still working to accurately assess how much work Odysseus will be able to perform on the lunar surface and to confirm the spacecraft’s physical condition after its unexpected fall.

“We expect to take photos and do a hands-on construction and evaluation of all external equipment,” Altemus said.

The company has not yet released images taken by the rover during its stay on the moon, but on Thursday it released photos taken by the lander as it approached the moon’s surface. Intuitive Machines also plans to launch a device called an Eagle cam aboard Odysseus that can take images of the spacecraft from a distance, Artemus confirmed Friday.

All told, Odysseus will likely last about nine days on the moon, said Tim Crane, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer. This is a slightly longer forecast than the one released by the company. fact sheet Prior to launch, it was suggested that Audi would take “approximately seven days”.

When asked how long the spacecraft would operate on the moon, Crane replied, “You’re going to have a tear in my eye.”

After nine days, “the sun will move beyond the solar array in whatever configuration it is in,” Crane said. “When the sun sets on Odi, the battery tries to keep the vehicle warm, but it ends up being extremely cold. And the electronics we make can withstand the deep cold of a moonlit night. You won’t be able to do it.”