Moon landing US clinches first touchdown in 50 times
Feb 23( Reuters)- A spacecraft erected and flown by Texas- grounded company Intuitive Machines landed near the moon's south pole on Thursday, the firstU.S. touchdown on the lunar face in further than half a century and the first ever achieved by the private sector.
NASA, with several exploration instruments aboard the vehicle, hailed the wharf as a major achievement in its thing of transferring a team of commercially flown spacecraft on scientific gibing operations to the moon ahead of a planned return of astronauts there latterly this decade.
But original dispatches problems following Thursday's wharf raised questions about whether the vehicle may have been left disabled or dammed in some way.
The uncrewed six-lawful robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, touched down at about 623p.m. EST( 2323 GMT), the company and NASA observers said in a common webcast of the wharf from Intuitive Machines'(LUNR.O), opens new tab charge operations center in Houston.
The wharf limited a nail- smelling final approach and descent in which a problem surfaced with the spacecraft's independent navigation system that needed masterminds on the ground to employ an untested work- around at the 11th hour.
It also took some time after an awaited radio knockout tore-establish dispatches with the spacecraft and determine its fate some 239,000 long hauls( 384,000 km) from Earth.
When contact was eventually renewed, the signal was faint, attesting that the lander had touched down but leaving charge control incontinently uncertain as to the precise condition and exposure of the vehicle, according to the webcast.
"Our outfit is on the face of the moon, and we're transmitting, so congratulations IM platoon," Intuitive Machines charge director Tim Crain was heard telling the operations center." We will see what further we can get from that."
Later in the evening, the company posted a message on the social media platform X saying flight controllers "have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data."
QUESTION OF OBSTRUCTION
Still, the weak signal suggested the spacecraft may have landed next to a crater wall or commodity differently that blocked or crashed its antenna, said Thomas Zurbuchen, a former NASA wisdom chief who oversaw creation of the agency's marketable moon lander program.
"Occasionally it could just be one gemstone, one big boulder, that is in the way," he said in a phone interview with Reuters.
Such an issue could complicate the lander's primary charge of planting its loads and meeting wisdom objects, Zurbuchen said.
Negotiating the wharf is" a major intermediate thing, but the thing of the charge is to do wisdom, and get the filmland back and so forth," he added.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson incontinently cheered Thursday's feat as a" triumph," saying," Odysseus has taken the moon.
"As planned, the spacecraft was believed to have come to rest at a crater named Malapert A near the moon's south pole, according to the webcast. The spacecraft wasn't designed to give live videotape of the wharf, which came one day after it reached lunar route and a week after its launch from Florida.
Thursday's wharf represented the first controlled descent to the lunar face by aU.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA's last crewed moon charge landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
To date, spacecraft from just four other countries have ever landed on the moon- the former Soviet Union, China, India and, substantially lately, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only one ever to have transferred humans to the lunar face.
Odysseus is carrying a suite of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several marketable guests designed to operate for seven days on solar energy before the sun sets over the polar wharf point.
The NASA cargo focuses on space rainfall relations with the moon's face, radio astronomy and other aspects of the lunar terrain for unborn wharf operations.
Odysseus was transferred on its way to the moon last Thursday atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk's company SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
DAWN OF ARTEMIS
Its appearance marked the first" soft wharf" on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first under NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of long- term, sustained lunar disquisition and a stepping gravestone toward eventual mortal breakouts to Mars. The action focuses on the moon's south pole in part because a presumed bounty of frozen water exists there that can be used for life support and product of rocket energy.
A host of small landers like Odysseus are anticipated to pave the way under NASA's Commercial Lunar cargo Services( CLPS) program, designed to deliver instruments and tackle to the moon at lower costs than theU.S. space agency's traditional system of structure and launching those vehicles itself.
Leaning more heavily on lower, less educated private gambles comes with its own pitfalls.
Just last month the lunar lander of another establishment, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in route onJan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance( ULA) Vulcan rocket.
The malfunction of Astrobotic's Peregrine lander marked the third failure of a private company to achieve a lunar touchdown, following ill- destined sweats by companies from Israel and Japan.
Although Odysseus is the rearmost star of NASA's CLPS program, the IM- 1 flight is considered an Intuitive Machines charge. The company wasco-founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, former deputy director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and now the company's chairman and CEO.
