Intuitive machines A spacecraft landed on the lunar surface yesterday. . . oblique. CEO Steve Altemus confirmed during a press conference Friday that while it was not a perfect landing, it is nothing short of a miracle that the spacecraft landed intact.
Using a small model of the lander, Altemus demonstrated how engineers believe the spacecraft, called Odysseus, performed its descent based on the most recent telemetry data.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Altemus said. “We are downloading data from the spacecraft buffers and commanding the spacecraft.”
Intuitive Machines confirmed yesterday that the lander touched down on the surface at 5:24 p.m. Central Time. making the company the first to put a privately built spacecraft on the moon — but many details about the condition of the vehicle were unknown. Part of the reason is that the onboard camera, an instrument called EagleCam, was turned off during landing. Without images, engineers had to rely on other data to determine the lander's orientation after landing.
Even now, the company continues to reconstruct the series of events that led to the historic landing. The company originally thought of Odysseus. he was actually upright, but Altemus said it was based on “outdated” telemetry data. The information currently available indicates that the spacecraft was indeed vertical at the time of landing, but because it was also moving horizontally (and a little too fast) it is likely that one of its legs caught on something or broke off, which caused him to bow.
The good news is that most of the payloads on board are not on the downward-facing panel, the only one that does not need to operate on the lunar surface. The company was able to confirm that many of the main subsystems, including the solar panels that supply power to the spacecraft and the payloads on board, are working well.
Much of the mission's success was due to the quick thinking of the Intuitive Machines mission controllers, and simply a stroke of very good luck.
Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, during a press conference after the landing of IM-1. Image credits: POT
Navigation problems began after Odysseus performed a planned maneuver called lunar orbital insertion on Wednesday night, which placed it into an elliptical orbit around the moon. That ended up being extremely “fortuitous,” Altemus said, because it led mission controllers to try to use a navigation subsystem called “laser rangefinders” much earlier than planned (the lasers were to be activated for the first time during the final phase descent). ).
After reviewing the data, the company realized on the morning of landing that the lasers were not working, because they did not turn off a physical safety switch on the component while it was still on the ground.
These lasers determine critical variables for landing, such as altitude and horizontal speed; If they didn't work, Odysseus could have succumbed to the fate of so many other landers and crashed on the surface. The company considered several options, but ultimately decided to use a NASA Doppler lidar payload that was intended as a technology demonstration. They ordered Odysseus to orbit the moon for an additional two-hour period, to give them more time to upload software patches and reset the lander's guidance, navigation and control system.
It was a remarkable save in the last minute. Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator for NASA's space technology mission directorate, said during the news conference that the agency hoped to bring Doppler lidar technology to a technology readiness level (TRL) of 6, but that successful execution aboard the Odysseus has taken it to TRL 9, the highest level of readiness.
“All that hard work paid off yesterday when there was a technical issue and the teams decided it was best to try to make the change and rely on this technology demonstration,” he said. “All we understand from the telemetry received, which is limited to this point, until we recover all the data, is that the technology worked perfectly.”