The first American spacecraft to reach the Moon in more than 50 years successfully landed on the moon Thursday, as part of a new fleet of commercial unmanned robots funded by NASA and intended to pave the way for astronaut missions later this year. decade.
The Odysseus module, from the company Intuitive Machines, successfully reached the lunar surface this Thursday after taking off seven days ago from Florida and achieved the milestone of being the first American spacecraft to land on the moon after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Shortly after the scheduled time, 4:24 p.m. Eastern time (21:24 GMT), mission controllers confirmed that, after having reduced its speed from 6,500 km/h, the module landed near the Malpert A crater, at about 300 kilometers from the lunar South Pole, where it will remain for approximately seven days until night falls in this region and it becomes inoperable.
Flight controllers confirmed that they had received a signal from the spacecraft after the moon landing. “Certainly our team is on the surface of the Moon, and we are streaming,” Tim Crain, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, said during the company’s livestream. “Congratulations IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get out of it.”
“Houston, Odysseus has a new home,” celebrated Stephen Altemus, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines.
Odysseus, as this Nova-C series module manufactured by the firm based in Houston (Texas) has been called, and which took off on February 15 from Florida propelled by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, has also been erected today in the first private American spacecraft to reach the natural satellite.
Those responsible for the mission estimate that, as Odysseus approached the lunar surface, he fired an external “EagleCam” that will capture images of the lander in the last seconds of its descent.
Last month, another American company failed in its attempt to reach the Moon, raising the stakes to prove that private industry had what it takes to repeat a feat last achieved by NASA during its manned Apollo mission. 17 in 1972.
This mission “will be one of the first forays to the South Pole to really observe the environmental conditions of a place where we are going to send our astronauts in the future,” said Joel Kearns, a senior NASA official. “What kind of dust or dirt is there, how hot or cold is it, what is the radiation environment? “These are all things you would really like to know before you send out the first human explorers.”
lunar south pole
Odysseus launched on February 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and has a new type of supercooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane propulsion system that allowed it to fly through space in record time.
Its destination, Malapert A, is an impact crater located 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole.
NASA hopes to establish a long-term presence there and harvest ice for drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.
Instruments carried by Odysseus include cameras to investigate how the lunar surface changes as a result of the plume of a spacecraft’s engines, and a device to analyze the clouds of charged dust particles that hover over the surface at twilight as result of solar radiation.
It also carries a landing system that fires laser pulses, measuring the time it takes for the signal to return and its change in frequency to accurately judge the speed of the spacecraft and its distance from the surface, in order to avoid a catastrophic impact. .
The hardware will operate for approximately seven days until lunar night occurs, which will render Odysseus inoperative.
Exclusive club
The rest of the cargo has been borne by private clients of Intuitive Machines, and includes 125 stainless steel mini moons by artist Jeff Koons.
There is also an archive created by a non-profit organization whose goal is to leave backup copies of human knowledge throughout the solar system.
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship its hardware under a new initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which it created to outsource payload services to the private sector to drive savings and stimulate a broader lunar economy.
The first, from Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft suffered a fuel leak and had to return to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere.
Spacecraft that land on the Moon have to avoid treacherous rocks and craters and, in the absence of an atmosphere that allows them to use parachutes, they must rely on thrusters to control their descent. About half of the more than 50 attempts have failed.
So far, only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan have achieved it, which constitutes an exclusive club.
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