The first lunar landing by a U.S. entity in 50 years was celebrated last week, but the lander from Intuitive Machines, named Odysseus, has had a challenging time as it landed at a tilted angle. New images released by the company show the damage that the Odysseus lander incurred during landing and sitting tilted on the moon’s surface, but the company stressed that it considered the mission a success as it was able to perform a controlled soft landing and get science data from all of its payloads.
The lander is expected to run out of power within a few hours, but there is a possibility the company will be able to power it back on in a couple of weeks once the lunar night ends.
The image shows the damage to the landing leg on the left side of the image here. It also shows the cloud of dust and rocks that were thrown up by the lander’s engines interacting with the moon’s surface in a known phenomenon called a plume effect. The damage to the leg seems to have occurred as the mission touched down around one mile from the planned landing site in an area with higher elevation, the company said in a briefing, causing the lander to come in faster than planned and making it skid across the surface.
The image shows how the Odysseus lander came to rest on the moon’s surface, tilted at an angle of around 30%. The large gold foil item is a helium tank.
The lander was not entirely on its side, as originally thought. It was “more upright than we initially thought,” Steve Altemus, chief executive officer and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said in the briefing. “We did land upright, we captured data, then we tilted over slowly in about two seconds and came to rest either on the opposite helium tank or a computer shelf and were able to communicate all six [NASA] payloads back, plus all six commercial payloads.”
The lander had communications problems in the first few days of landing, but the team eventually got a small amount of data from the various NASA payloads on board. “Instead of ending up with a few bytes of data, which was the baseline goal for us, we’ve got over 50MB of data,” said Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at NASA Johnson.
The mission had a variety of challenges, including a drift in the control of the spacecraft using its engines, which had to be patched, and ending up in the wrong orbit before landing, which required a correction maneuver. Despite difficulties with the landing and communications, however, NASA and Intuitive Machines say that the mission was a success. Altemus described the mission as a pathfinder and stressed that “the whole idea of this mission was not to live as long as you could on the surface. This mission was intended as a scout.”
