The Odysseus probe has sent its first images of the moon despite reversing during the lunar landing, the American company Intuitive Machines announced on Monday, sharing two photos.
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The spacecraft, more than four meters high, landed on the moon at 11:23 p.m. GMT on Thursday, a first for the United States in more than 50 years. This is also a first for a private company.
But twists and turns, particularly a navigation system failure, made the final descent difficult and the probe ended up on its side instead of landing vertically.
“Odysseus continues to communicate with Nova Control flight controllers from the lunar surface,” Intuitive Machines said Monday, releasing two photos on X, one of the spacecraft’s descent and another taken 35 seconds after the rollover.
The latter reveals the regolith (lunar dust) of Malapert Crater, the southernmost location on the Moon where a spacecraft has ever landed.
AFP
In particular, the device carries scientific instruments from NASA, which wants to explore the south pole of the moon as part of its Artemis missions before sending its astronauts there. The American space agency has decided to order this service from private companies.
This strategy should allow him to make the trip more often and for less money. But also to stimulate the development of a lunar economy capable of supporting a sustained human presence on the Moon, one of the goals of the Artemis program.
“Optimistic”
It is a “success with small drawbacks,” commented astronomer and space mission expert Jonathan McDowell to AFP, estimating that the NASA project is heading in the right direction when “certainly things need to be clarified for the next missions.”
AFP
On Friday, Intuitive Machines revealed that its engineers had forgotten to manually disable a safety switch that was supposed to prevent the device's laser guidance system from activating. The company was dependent on an experimental system from NASA.
NASA's LRO spacecraft, which is in orbit around the moon, photographed the lander on Saturday at a location 1.5 km from its originally planned landing site.
The university team responsible for an external camera originally planned to be ejected during Odysseus's landing flight said over the weekend that it remains “optimistic” about the possibility of ejecting EagleCam from the lander and taking photos from a distance of four meters.
Japan's SLIM probe, which has been stationed on the moon since the end of January, has been reactivated, Jaxa, the country's space agency, said on Monday. Additionally, it was positioned at an angle and its west-facing photovoltaic cells received no sunlight.
To Jonathan McDowell, these two falls could indicate that the upper parts of current probes are too heavy and therefore current generation machines are more likely to tip over in low gravity.