Odysseus, the moon lander, was found to be alive and well despite tipping sideways on the lunar surface
Houston-based Intuitive Machines (LUNR.O), opens new tab, also revealed that human error caused a failure of the spacecraft’s laser-based range finders, how engineers discovered the glitch by chance hours before landing time, and how they devised an emergency fix that saved the mission from a crash.
Although the Odysseus landed safely on Thursday, flight engineers’ data analysis revealed that the six-legged drone appeared to tripped over its own feet as it approached the conclusion of its final descent, company officials stated during a briefing the following day.
The spacecraft is thought to have caught one of its landing feet on the uneven lunar surface and turned over, coming to rest sideways, propped up on a boulder at one end, according to CEO Stephen Altemus, whose business designed and flew the lander.
Still, Altemus told reporters that Odysseus “is stable near or at our intended landing site,” which is near a crater called Malapert A in the moon’s south pole region.
“We do have communications with the lander,” Altemus said, adding that mission control personnel are issuing commands to the vehicle. They were also attempting to collect the first photo photographs of the lunar surface from the landing location.
Odysseus is “alive and well,” according to a brief mission status update issued on the company’s website earlier on Friday.
The company reported shortly after touchdown on Thursday that radio signals indicated Odysseus, a 13-foot-tall hexagonal cylinder, had landed in an upright position, but Altemus admitted the inaccurate conclusion was based on previous telemetry.
DOWNSIDES OF SIDEWAYS
Although the lander’s sideways posture is not ideal, company executives claimed that all but one of its six NASA science and technology payloads were mounted on areas of the spacecraft that were exposed and receptive to communications, “which is very good for us,” Altemus said.
However, Altemus stated that two of the spacecraft’s antennae were left directed at the surface, which will hamper communication with the lander.
Also, the functionality of a solar energy panel on top of Odysseus, which is now facing the wrong way, is unknown, but a second array on the spacecraft’s side looks to be operational, and the spacecraft’s batteries have been fully charged, he said.
The unmanned robot spacecraft reached the lunar surface on Thursday after a nerve-racking final approach and descent in which a problem with its navigation system surfaced, forcing flight controllers on the ground to use an untested workaround to avoid a catastrophic crash landing.
The original laser-powered range finders were rendered inoperable after company engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida unintentionally failed to unlock a safety valve prior to the lander’s ascent into space last Thursday, Altemus said.
The fault was discovered by chance a week later during lunar orbit, with only hours to go before landing, while flight controllers were debugging another issue.
Otherwise, they might not have recognized the safety lock was still on until it was time to turn on the range finders in the final five minutes of descent, according to mission director Tim Crain.
Tensions rose as engineers discovered that existing software on the spaceship could not bypass the safety lock to activate the range finders, according to company executives.
Finally, programmers hurried to build software that instructed the lander to rely on an experimental NASA Lidar payload onboard – a remote sensing technology that uses quick pulses of laser-like light and their reflections to determine distances between objects.
Odysseus’ health was uncertain shortly after landing. It took some time after an expected radio blackout to re-establish connections with the spacecraft and assess its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) away from Earth.
When contact was ultimately restored, the signal was feeble, confirming that the lander had landed but leaving mission control in the dark about the vehicle’s exact state and location, according to company officials during a webcast of the event on Thursday evening.
Crain estimated that the lander’s payloads would be able to work for nine or ten days after the sun had set on the polar landing site.
