Intuitive Machines‘ spacecraft touched down yesterday on the lunar surface… sideways. CEO Steve Altemus confirmed during a press conference Friday that, while it wasn’t an ideal touchdown, it’s nothing in need of a miracle the spacecraft landed intact in any respect.
Utilizing a small mannequin of the lander, Altemus demonstrated how engineers imagine the spacecraft, known as Odysseus, made its descent given the latest telemetry information.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Altemus mentioned. “We’re downloading data from the buffers in the spacecraft and commanding the spacecraft.”
Intuitive Machines confirmed yesterday that the lander touched down on the floor at 5:24 p.m. Central Time — making the company the first to put a privately-built spacecraft on the moon — however many particulars concerning the car’s well being have been unknown. A part of the explanation for that’s as a result of the onboard digital camera, an instrument known as EagleCam, was powered down throughout touchdown. With out photos, engineers needed to depend on different information to find out the lander’s orientation after it landed.
Even now, the corporate is continuous to reconstruct the collection of occasions that led as much as the historic touchdown. The corporate initially thought Odysseus was actually upright, however Altemus mentioned that was based mostly on “stale” telemetry information. At present obtainable data is indicating that the spacecraft was certainly vertical at landing, however as a result of it was additionally transferring horizontally — and somewhat too shortly — it’s possible that one in every of its legs caught on one thing or broke, inflicting it to tilt over.
The excellent news is that a lot of the onboard payloads should not on the downward-facing panel; the one one that’s doesn’t must function on the lunar floor. The corporate was in a position to verify that lots of the main subsystems — together with the photo voltaic arrays offering energy to the spacecraft and the onboard payloads — are performing properly.
A lot of the mission’s success got here all the way down to very fast considering by Intuitive Machines’ mission controllers — and only a stroke of excellent luck.
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus throughout a press convention after the IM-1 touchdown
The navigational points began after Odysseus performed a deliberate maneuver known as lunar orbital insertion on Wednesday night time, which put it in an elliptical orbit across the moon. That ended up being extraordinarily “fortuitous,” Altemus mentioned, as a result of it led mission controllers to attempt to use a navigational subsystem known as “laser rangefinders” far sooner than deliberate (the lasers have been going to be activated for the primary time in the course of the last descent section).
After reviewing the information, the corporate realized the morning of touchdown that the lasers weren’t working — as a result of they didn’t flip off a bodily security swap on the part whereas it was nonetheless on the bottom.
These lasers decide important variables for touchdown, like altitude and horizontal velocity; with them non-functional, Odysseus might’ve succumbed to the destiny of so many different landers and crashed on the floor. The corporate thought of a handful of choices, however in the end they determined to make use of a NASA doppler lidar payload that was meant as a know-how demonstration. They directed Odysseus to orbit the moon for a further two-hour interval, to provide them extra time to load software program patches and reset the lander’s steerage, navigation and management system.
It was a exceptional last-minute save. Prasun Desai, deputy affiliate administrator of NASA’s house know-how mission directorate, mentioned in the course of the press convention that the company hoped to get the doppler lidar know-how to a know-how readiness stage (TRL) of 6, however that the profitable execution onboard Odysseus has introduced it to TRL 9, the very best stage of readiness.
“All that hard work came to bear yesterday when there was a technical issue and the teams decided that hey, it was best to try to do the switch and rely on this tech demonstration,” he mentioned. “Everything we understand from the telemetry received, which is limited to this point, until we get all the data back, is that the technology performed flawlessly.”
