After a nail-biting landing and tense silence on the lunar surface, the United States returned to the moon.
The robotic lander Odysseus, built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, touched down near the moon’s south pole this evening (February 22).
This was a turning point for space exploration: No private spacecraft had ever made a soft landing on the moon before, and no American craft had made a soft impact on the gray earth since NASA’s crewed Apollo 17 lander did so in December 1972.
“What a victory! Odysseus took the Moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video message the agency released immediately after confirmation of a successful landing. “This achievement is a giant step forward for all humanity. Stay tuned!”
Relating to: Missions to the Moon: Past, present and future
return to the moon
The Moon was a frequent target of American spacecraft in the 1960s and early 1970s. This effort was not motivated by pure scientific curiosity: Landing astronauts on Earth’s closest neighbor was seen as a national security imperative, a way to demonstrate the country’s technological superiority over its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union.
The United States famously placed 12 astronauts on the lunar surface during six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. With the moon race clearly won, NASA was directed to focus on other goals for the human spaceflight program, particularly development and operation. from the space shuttle program.
The US launched a series of robotic lunar probes after the Apollo era; For example, NASA’s sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been orbiting the moon since 2009. But despite some frustrating periods and starts, getting back to the surface wasn’t a priority until recently.
In December 2017, then-President Donald Trump ordered NASA to send astronauts back to the moon in the relatively near future. This directive gave rise to a broad and ambitious program called Artemis, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the Moon by the end of the 2020s, and to use the information gained in doing so to assist in the deployment of astronauts. To Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s.
NASA plans to establish one or more Artemis bases in the moon’s south polar region, where it is thought to contain abundant water ice. But before sending astronauts there, the agency wants to collect more data about this little-explored area; for example, to help determine how much water it contains and how easy it is to access this important resource.
So NASA established another program called CLPS (“Commercial Lunar Payload Services”), which books trips for agency science instruments on robotic lunar landers built by American companies.
“The goal here is to explore the moon in preparation for Artemis and do really different work for NASA,” Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said at a Feb. 12 press conference. “One of our main goals is to make sure we develop the lunar economy.”
This is where Intuitive Machines come into play.
Relating to: The 10 most beautiful images from NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission
Sending NASA science to the moon
In 2019, CLPS selected Intuitive Machines to deliver a set of NASA science instruments to the lunar surface using the company’s Nova-C lander, which is about the size of a British telephone booth.
After some changes, the task order turned out to be worth $118 million, NASA officials said recently. Intuitive Machines’ first month mission, which the company calls IM-1, involved transporting six in-house experiments and technology demonstrations. This mission involves a Nova-C vehicle named Odysseus, named after the famous wandering hero in Greek mythology.
The NASA instruments, which cost the agency an additional $11 million to develop, are designed to conduct a variety of research. For example, one of them, called NDL (“Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precision Speed and Range Detection”), used LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to collect data during descent and descent. As you’ll see below, NDL turned out to be vital to today’s touchdown.
Another instrument is designed to study how spacecraft engine exhaust interacts with lunar soil and rocks. Another will demonstrate autonomous positioning technology that could eventually become part of a large GPS-like navigation system on and around the moon.
Intuitive Machines also put six commercial payloads on Odysseus for IM-1. One of these comes from Columbia Sportswear, which wants to test its “Omni-Heat Infinity” insulation material in deep space. Another is a series of sculptures by artist Jeff Koons, and there’s even a “secure lunar repository” intended to help preserve humanity’s accumulated store of knowledge.
Odysseus also flew EagleCam, a camera system developed by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University students. EagleCam is designed to deploy from Odysseus about 100 feet (30 meters) above the lunar surface and take photos of the lander’s epic descent from below. You can learn more about all 12 IM-1 payloads here.
making history
These 12 payloads took off on February 15 when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent Odysseus toward the moon. The lander’s journey into deep space was short and relatively smooth, but things got a little sporty towards the end.
Odysseus reached lunar orbit yesterday (February 21) as planned. But during today’s landing attempt, the lander’s attendants discovered that the laser rangefinders that allowed Odysseus to determine its altitude and horizontal speed were not working properly. So the team pressed NASA’s experimental NDL payload into service for this vital function and pushed back the landing attempt by two hours to put the new plan into action.
This last-minute workaround, which required the team to design a software patch on the ground and beam it to Odysseus, worked. Today at 18:11 EST (2311 GMT), Odysseus activated its main engine, performing a crucial 11-minute burn that slowed the craft’s descent toward the lunar surface. Then, at 6:23 p.m. EST (2353 GMT) Odysseus touched down softly on the rim of the Malapert A crater, about 190 miles (300 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole.
However, success was not immediate. It took the IM-1 team approximately 15 tense minutes to intercept Odysseus’ signal.
Mission director Tim Crain said after this milestone moment: “What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting.” “Odysseus has found his new home.”
If all goes as planned, the lander and its payloads will now operate on the lunar surface for approximately seven Earth days. IM-1 will end when the sun sets on Malapert A because Odysseus was not designed to withstand the bitter cold of the long lunar night. (The moon takes more than 27 Earth days to rotate on its axis, so each lunar night lasts roughly two weeks.)
RELATED STORIES:
— Why is it so difficult to land on the moon?
— What are Intuitive Machines and how do they aim to reach the moon?
— NASA’s Artemis program: Everything you need to know
IM-1 is part of the newly energized march towards the moon. For example, Pittsburgh company Astrobotic launched its Peregrine lunar lander last month on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket.
But Peregrine, which also carries NASA payloads through the CLPS program, suffered a crippling fuel leak from the rocket’s upper stage just after launch. The problem prevented Peregrine from going to the moon, and Astrobotic eventually guided it to a controlled extinction in Earth’s atmosphere on January 18.
Two other private Moon landers have recently made it into lunar orbit: Israel’s Beresheet probe and Hakuto-R, built by the Tokyo-based company ispace. Yet neither could take the next big step; Beresheet crashed during a landing attempt in April 2019, and Hakuto-R suffered the same fate in April 2023.
National governments are also increasingly shooting for the moon.
Last August, for example, India landed the robotic Chandrayaan-3 mission near the Moon’s south pole. And just last month, Japan landed its own lunar probe, called SLIM. This was the first such success for any nation; They joined the Moon party, which now includes the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.
And some of these countries have even bigger lunar ambitions.
Of course, there is the USA with its Artemis program. But China also aims to send astronauts to the moon by 2030 and is working (with Russia and some other countries) to develop a lunar outpost later this decade. Meanwhile, India has said it wants to land boats on Earth’s natural satellite in 2040 or thereabouts.
Some politicians have described this planned activity as a race for the new moon, a competition between the United States and China for the right to establish high-border precedents and norms of behavior. But exploration advocates tend to see the more positive side, emphasizing the impending exploitation of lunar resources that could help humanity expand its footprint into the solar system for the first time.
Either way, the moon is coming into sharper focus for nations and businesses around the world. It’s going to get busier and busier there.