Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander, coming down faster than expected and moving slightly to one side at the bottom moment of touchdown On Thursday, he apparently hit the sole of his foot on the moon's surface and fell on its side, officials said Friday.
Telemetry indicates that the top of the spacecraft may be resting on a rock or the lander may be tipping over on an upward-sloping terrain. But Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, said Odysseus is still capable of harvesting energy from the sun and sending engineering and scientific data back to Earth.
Engineers are downloading data and hope to downlink stored images as soon as this weekend to clarify the orientation of the 4.5-meter spacecraft.
"We download and manage data from the buffers in the spacecraft and try to get surface images for you, because I know everyone is hungry for that," Altemus said.
In the meantime, all of the lander's active instruments, provided by NASA and commercial customers, have turned away from the lunar surface and should be able to return data as planned. But it will likely take longer than expected as some of the tilted spacecraft's antennas are not pointed toward Earth.
And there isn't much time. Regardless of the turnaround, the sun will sink below the horizon at the landing site in just over a week, putting an end to power generation from the lander's solar cells. That was always in the cards.
The spacecraft is not designed to withstand the ultra-low temperatures of the lunar night and although flight controllers will attempt to contact the probe again when the sun rises again, they do not expect Odysseus to respond.
"Three Major Achievements"
That said, Joel Kearns, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for exploration, praised Intuitive Machines for the anomalous but still successful landing.
"Let me congratulate Intuitive Machines on three major achievements," he said. "The first is because of the first successful soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. The second is because we are the first non-governmental commercial organization to actually land safely.
"And the third is for having a landing point at 80 degrees south latitude, much closer to the moon's south pole than any previous American robotic or human explorer."
That's important for NASA, which plans to send Artemis astronauts to the Antarctic in the coming years to search for possible ice deposits while establishing a long-term presence on the moon.
Odysseus was funded in part by NASA's Commercial Lunar Services Payloads program, intended to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that the agency can then use to transport payloads to the moon.
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six payloads to the moon aboard Odysseus.
Launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketOdysseus entered orbit around the moon on Wednesday. The flight controllers then raised the runway slightly to correct a minor targeting error and were preparing for landing when they encountered problems with a sensor package needed to refine the trajectory to landing.
Fortunately for Intuitive Machines, one of the six NASA payloads aboard Odysseus was intended to test a different type of navigation sensor, an instrument known as NDL, which stands for Navigation Doppler Lidar.
The NDL system works like a radar, but captures reflected laser light instead of radio waves to accurately measure the vehicle's speed, direction and altitude.
Odysseus was ordered to make an additional lunar orbit while engineers hurriedly wrote and tested software patches to integrate the NASA system into the lander's navigation algorithms.
"That's what allowed them to be successful," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told CBS News Thursday evening. "It was a NASA payload that saved the day. (But) take nothing away from Odysseus and Intuitive Machines, because this is the first commercial lander that can achieve this feat."
As Odysseus approached his landing site, he ascended from horizontal to vertical for the final descent to landing. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to land at a purely vertical speed of only 2 miles per hour, about a moderate walking pace.
However, because of the unexpected lateral velocity, engineers believe one of the lander's six footpads may have hit a rock or become stuck in a crevice, causing the spacecraft to fall over.
Based on telemetry, "it has to be raised slightly above the surface horizontally, so that's why we think it's on a rock or the base is in a crevice or something to keep it in that position," Altemus said.
The revelation that Odysseus had toppled upon landing came as a surprise after an overnight update from Intuitive Machines said telemetry indicated the spacecraft was upright. Altemus said Friday that that conclusion was based on "outdated data."
A more in-depth analysis of the remaining propellant and data from inertial measurement units showing the direction of gravity showed that the spacecraft was in fact on its side.
The landing highlighted the risks faced by any robotic spacecraft attempting to land in unknown terrain and the challenge of autonomously navigating around rocks and other obstacles not visible from orbit.
a Japanese lunar probe toppled on touchdown last month, limiting its ability to complete its planned science agenda. Altemus and Tim Crain, Intuitive's chief technology officer, were both optimistic that Odysseus can still achieve most of its goals.
But at least one hoped-for goal will not be achieved.
An experimental camera system built by students at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, designed to be released before landing to capture images of the lander during its final descent, was not deployed as planned due to software limitations related to the guidance system problem .
The "EagleCam" package will be ejected later, Altemus said, shot dozens of feet to one side. If all goes well, the cameras will show Odysseus on its side, giving engineers - and the public - the best view of the spacecraft's orientation.
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