WASHINGTON — A robotic lander developed by Intuitive Machines landed safely on the moon Feb. 22, becoming the first privately developed spacecraft to touch down on the moon and the first American spacecraft to do so in more than half a century.
The Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, landed on in the south polar regions of the moon at 6:23 p.m. Eastern on the IM-1 mission. It took about 15 minutes after landing for controllers to confirm they were receiving a signal from the lander on the surface, getting only a weak signal initially.
“What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines flight director for the landing attempt, said. “So, congratulations, IM team.”
Intuitive Machines delayed the landing by two hours to perform an additional orbit of the moon. The company said that it determined that laser rangefinders on the lander, a key instrument to enable a precise landing, were not working properly. Controllers uploaded a software patch to enable to the lander to use in their place use a NASA Doppler lidar payload originally intended to be a technology demonstration.
“Basically, it is the primary system to help provide the velocity and altitude information,” said Prasun Desai, NASA deputy associate administrator for space technology, of the NASA payload during the landing broadcast.
Odysseus lifted off Feb. 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, which placed the spacecraft on trajectory to the moon. After a commissioning maneuver to test the spacecraft’s liquid oxygen and methane engine, it performed two trajectory correction maneuvers before going into low lunar orbit Feb. 21.
The landing was the first on the moon by a privately developed spacecraft. It was also the first soft landing on the moon by any American spacecraft since the last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972.
The IM-1 mission carried six NASA payloads through the…
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