"Sleeping on the Job: Odysseus Craft's Lunar Sojourn Begins with Unexpected Rest"

"Sleeping on the Job: Odysseus Craft's Lunar Sojourn Begins with Unexpected Rest"
"Sleeping on the Job: Odysseus Craft's Lunar Sojourn Begins with Unexpected Rest"
American space news: Odysseus spacecraft drifts into a slumber on the moon after an uneven landing
On Thursday, as it entered a cold lunar night, the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon in fifty years, Odysseus, lost power and fell into dormancy, completing its main mission after a botched landing a week earlier that hampered its operations and scientific objectives.
Before it became dark near the south pole of the moon, the spacecraft sent a final "farewell transmission" to ground control. NASA paid Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based aerospace company, $118 million to develop and fly Odysseus.
Sleep well, Odie. In an online update, Intelligent expressed its desire to hear from the public once more under the affectionate name that the spacecraft's engineers gave to a lander that they believed was more durable than anticipated.
If Odysseus has enough solar power to revive in three weeks with the next dawn over its landing spot, the teams at Intuitive will programme it to "phone home" to the firm's ground control centre in Houston, the company said earlier today.

As the sun dipped below the lunar horizon and solar energy regeneration became inadequate, the corporation had earlier predicted that Odysseus would most certainly run out of battery power around Wednesday night, shortly after its sixth full day on the moon.

Odysseus was "still kicking," according to Intuitive's Thursday morning statement, and flight controllers planned to try to download one more stream of data sent the 385,000 kilometres (239,000 miles) to Earth before losing touch.

With a market worth of almost $600 million, Intuitive's shares stayed up approximately 20% from immediately before the launch, despite experiencing huge fluctuations of nearly thrice and then thrice again throughout the mission.
Launched on February 15 from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket donated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the six-legged Nova-C-class lander has a hexagonal cylinder form and is thirteen feet (four metres) tall. It took six days for it to reach lunar orbit.

Last Thursday, the vehicle finally made it to the lunar surface after a last-minute navigational hiccup and a nerve-wracking fall. Odysseus caught one foot on the ground and landed in an awkwardly angled position, which immediately hindered its operations.

As far as Intuitive Machines is concerned, the navigational problem was caused by human mistake. The vehicle's laser-guided range finders could not be activated after launch because a safety switch had not been manually unlocked by the flight preparation teams. As a result, flight engineers had to quickly come up with a solution while in lunar orbit.

According to business authorities, the vehicle landed askew after reportedly snagging a foot on the uneven terrain and coming to resting tilting at a 30-degree angle. While the last-minute workaround certainly saved a catastrophic landing, it may have contributed to the landing.

On Wednesday, a photo emerged showing the spacecraft's landing gear clearly damaged as it was about to touch down on the surface.

According to the business, the lander had two damaged antennas and solar panels pointed in the incorrect direction.

According to NASA, they were able to get data from all six of the research packages sent by Odysseus, even though they had ongoing problems with the lander's communication and charging its solar batteries.

Executives from both Intuitive and NASA were ecstatic with the groundbreaking research that came out of the mission, as well as the historic "soft" lunar landing that was the first of its kind using a spacecraft that was owned and controlled by a private company.

Additionally, since NASA's last crewed Apollo mission to the moon in 1972, Odysseus was the first American spacecraft to accomplish a controlled descent to the lunar surface.

It was also the first of its kind under NASA's Artemis programme, which plans to send a slew of private robot landers to the moon for research and reconnaissance missions before sending humans back to the one natural satellite Earth has until the end of this decade.

Only the space agencies of four nations—the Soviet Union, China, India, and most recently Japan—have managed a "soft" moon landing. Last month, Japan's lander also had a similar mishap.

Only the United States of America has ever sent people to the moon. (Editing by Andrew Heavens, Lisa Shumaker, and Lincoln Feast; Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles)
 

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