WASHINGTON — NASA and Intuitive Machines declared the IM-1 mission, in its final hours, an “unqualified success” despite a hard landing that left the spacecraft askew.
At a press conference Feb. 28, agency and company officials said they had received data from nearly all the payloads on the Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, that landed six days earlier near Malapert A crater in the south polar regions of the moon.
“We had some very high level mission objectives to touch down softly on the surface of the moon — softly and safely — and return scientific data to our customers,” said Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines. “Both of those objectives are met, so in our minds this is an unqualified success.”
NASA said it received data from all five of its active payloads on the IM-1 mission, some of which operated during the transit to the moon and some which provided data after landing. A sixth payload is a laser retroreflector that will be tested in the coming months.
“A soft touchdown on the moon in a great accomplishment,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “This mission is a pathfinder. You can think of it as a flight test.”
At a separate briefing earlier in the day, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson backed that conclusion. “Odysseus is a success from NASA’s point of view,” he said.
That assessment came from a landing that was not necessarily that soft. The company previously said the laser rangefinders on the spacecraft were inoperable, and instead modified software to use lasers on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar. At a Feb. 23 briefing, company officials said they believed that effort was a success.
However, Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer, said that while engineers has successfully mapped the data from the NASA payload into their software, they had missed a data flag in the software to…
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