The Odysseus lunar lander flips over on landing

Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander, descending faster than expected and moving slightly to one side upon landing Thursday, appeared to hit a ripple in the lunar surface and flipped onto its side, officials said Friday.

Telemetry indicates that the top of the spacecraft may have rested on a rock or that the lander may have tipped over on upward-sloping terrain. But Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said Odysseus is still capable of drawing energy from the sun and sending engineering and scientific data to Earth. It's just a little upside down.

Engineers are downloading the data and hope to transmit the stored images as early as this weekend, clarifying the orientation of the 2-meter-tall spacecraft.

“We're downloading and commanding data from the spacecraft's buffers and trying to get you photos of the surface, because I know everyone's hungry for those,” Altemus said.

Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, uses a model of the company's Odysseus lunar lander to illustrate how the spacecraft likely flipped over during Thursday's landing. Based on telemetry, it appears that the upper section of the lander is resting on a rock (the small blue model). It's also possible that the spacecraft overturned on sloping terrain or got one of its foot pads stuck in a crevasse.

Meanwhile, all of the lander's active instruments, provided by NASA and commercial customers, are aimed at the lunar surface and should be able to return data as expected. But it will likely take longer than expected, as some of the inclined spacecraft's antennas are not facing Earth.

And there isn't much time. Regardless of the rollover, the sun will dip below the horizon at the landing site in just over a week, ending power production by the lander's solar cells. This was always expected.

The spacecraft was not designed to withstand the very low temperatures of the lunar night, and although flight controllers will try to contact the probe again when the sun rises again, they do not expect Odysseus to respond.

So the first US spacecraft to land on the Moon in 50 years was only a partial success. Lunar exploration seems to face more problems than in the 60s and 70s, or the engineers are more superficial…

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The article The Odysseus lunar lander flips over on landing comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-lander-lunare-odysseus-si-ribalta-in-atterraggio/ on Sun, 25 Feb 2024 07:00:44 +0000.