Odysseus makes moon-landing breakthrough

Odysseus (pic), the first United States spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century, neared a mission-ending slumber six days after a lopsided touchdown that hindered its operation, though Nasa and the company behind the vehicle cheered its performance as a success.

Despite persistent difficulties in communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, Nasa said it managed to extract some data from all six of its science payloads delivered by Odysseus, built and flown by Texas-based Intuitive Machines.

“We have conducted a very successful mission at this point,” Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus told a joint news briefing with Nasa officials on Wednesday.

Sue Lederer, a Nasa project scientist, described the stream of data as going from “a cocktail-size straw to a boba-tea-size straw of data”.

Still, Intuitive and Nasa executives hailed the science achieved and the “soft” lunar landing itself – the first ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle – as a key breakthrough in a new chapter of lunar exploration.

Odysseus was also the first US spacecraft to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface since Nasa’s final crewed Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.

It was also the first under Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to send several more commercial robot landers to the moon on science scouting missions ahead of a planned return of astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite later this decade.

To date, space agencies of just four other countries have put a lander on the moon. — Reuters