News Brief
First US Moon Landing In Over 50 Years As Private Lander Touches Down On Lunar Surface: Here's All You Need To Know
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft
A Houston-based company has landed America's first spaceship on the Moon in more than 50 years.
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down on the moon Thursday, becoming the first US-built spacecraft to stick a moon landing in more than 50 years and the first ever by a private company.
After delaying the final descent by one orbit to press an experimental NASA navigation sensor into service - and to test hurriedly-written software patches to route its data to the lander's flight computer - Odysseus settled to a touchdown near a lunar crater known as Malapert, around 300 km from the south pole of the moon.
Engineers at the Nova control center of Intuitive Machines in Houston expected a brief delay of up to two minutes to reconnect communications post-landing, yet the awaited signal was initially elusive.
Eventually, a communications antenna in the United Kingdom detected a weak signal, confirming the spacecraft's successful landing on the lunar surface.
Mission Director Tim Crain announced to the flight control team, "What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting".
"So congratulations, IM team! We'll see how much more we can get from that," Crain added.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also lauded Intuitive Machines, SpaceX for the Falcon 9 rocket's successful launch of Odysseus from the Kennedy Space Center last week, and NASA's commercial moon initiative for achieving what he described as "the landing of a lifetime."
"Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the voyage up there. And today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA's commercial partnerships."
"What a triumph! ... This feat is a giant leap forward for all of humanity," he concluded.
However, a comprehensive evaluation of the spacecraft's condition and its cargo was pending until telemetry data could be analysed.
Two hours following the landing, Intuitive Machines reported that "after troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface."
NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest ice there for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.
Instruments carried on Odysseus include cameras to investigate how the lunar surface changes as a result of the engine plume from a spaceship, and a device to analyze clouds of charged dust particles that hang over the surface at twilight as a result of solar radiation.
It also carries a NASA landing system that fires laser pulses, measuring the time taken for the signal to return and its change in frequency to precisely judge the spacecraft's velocity and distance from the surface, to avoid a catastrophic impact.
