The Odysseus probe sent its first images of the Moon, despite its reversal during the moon landing, the American company Intuitive Machines revealed on Monday, which shared two photos.
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The craft, which measures 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, notably a failure of its navigation system, complicated the final descent and the probe found itself lying on one side instead of landing vertically.
“Odysseus continues to communicate with Nova Control flight controllers from the lunar surface,” Intuitive Machines said Monday, posting two photos on X, one of the spacecraft’s descent and another taken 35 seconds after its rollover .
The latter reveals the regolith (lunar dust) of the Malapert crater, at the southernmost place on the Moon where a spacecraft has ever landed.
AFP
The device notably transports scientific instruments from NASA, which wishes to explore the south pole of the Moon before sending its astronauts there, as part of its Artemis missions. 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 lasting 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 for AFP, estimating that, if “there are certainly things to be resolved for the next missions”, the NASA project is going in the right direction.
AFP
On Friday, Intuitive Machines revealed that its engineers had forgotten to manually deactivate a safety switch supposed to prevent activation of the device’s laser guidance system. The company had to rely on an experimental system from NASA.
NASA’s LRO probe, in orbit around the Moon, photographed the lander on Saturday at a location 1.5 km from its initially planned landing site.
The university team responsible for an external camera that was initially planned to eject from Odysseus during its descent said over the weekend that it remained “optimistic” about the possibility of ejecting EagleCam from the lander and take photos from a distance of four meters.
The Japanese SLIM probe, placed on the Moon since the end of January, has been activated again, Jaxa, the country’s space agency, announced on Monday. It was also placed at an angle and its photovoltaic cells facing west did not receive sunlight.
For Jonathan McDowell, these two falls could indicate that the upper parts of current probes are too heavy and therefore that current generation machines are more likely to overturn in low gravity.
