Engineers worked fast to safely land Odysseus
Makeshift navigation solution dazzles the scientific community
Intuitive Machines’ lander was circling the moon ahead of its Thursday landing when a serious problem emerged: lasers crucial to reaching the lunar surface were not working.
Mission control for the Houston-based company needed a space cowboy solution — and fast. They came up with a fix that has since dazzled the science community.
Engineers reset the lander’s guidance, navigation and control system to use two alternate laser beams from a piece of NASA equipment flying onboard.
“We weren’t planning to use it in line with the actual mission coming down to a landing,” Prasun Desai, NASA’s deputy associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate, said just before the descent. “But now we are.”
The lasers, part of a technology demonstration, provided crucial velocity and altitude information to softly land the spacecraft — aptly named Odysseus for the ancient Greek character who surmounts many challenges — shortly before 5:30 p.m. CST.
The vehicle came to rest at an angle, potentially propped up on a rock or with its foot in a crevice, but it’s in a position where most of its payloads should be operational, according to the company.
“This is the kind of thing that would have taken a month,” Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said of the software fix. “Our team basically did that in an hour and a half, and it worked.”
That ability to quickly solve problems is a unique aspect of using privately owned landers, said Philip Metzger, director of the Stephen W. Hawking Center for Microgravity Research and Education at the University of Central Florida.
“They’re agile,” Metzger said. “They’re willing to take risks.”
Odysseus is owned and operated by Intuitive Machines, but it was developed through a NASA initiative. The agency
“If you think back from the Apollo days, there wasn’t one mission that went absolutely perfectly.” CEO Steve Altemus
provided some funding and guidance for this mission.
It was the first Americanmade vehicle to touch down on the lunar surface since the last Apollo moon mission in 1972 — and the first from a commercial company to ever do it.
The descent wasn’t the only hurdle Odysseus had to overcome.
There was an issue shortly after its Feb. 15 launch where the lander rejected data that uses distant stars to orient itself. A software patch solved the problem.
After the laser debacle, the team had trouble communicating with the vehicle, and it took several minutes to rouse a faint signal.
Because the lander is at an angle, some of its antennas are pointed at the moon’s surface. And those can’t be used to talk with the Earth, hindering communications.
Metzger said this could slow the rate at which data is returned to Earth.
The South Pole also presents other challenges. Metzger said Earth is low on the horizon. Signals could reflect off the lunar terrain or be interrupted by phenomena that include radiation and charged particles emitted from the sun.
NASA has six science instruments and technology demonstrations onboard the lander, including the lightbased guidance system that the spacecraft used to land.
Lasers emitted from the lander bounced off the moon and returned to the spacecraft, providing data on speed, direction and altitude.
Among the non-NASA payloads was a camera that was supposed to eject from Odysseus and take pictures of the spacecraft landing. Intuitive Machines and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University abandoned that plan after the software patch ahead of landing, but the camera could still be used in the coming days.
Intuitive Machines was still working to release other photos as of Friday afternoon.
The company expected the spacecraft to be operational for about seven days while the South Pole receives sunlight to power the various instruments and heaters that keep the spacecraft warm.
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus praised his team, saying they remained cool under pressure and got Odysseus to the lunar surface.
“If you think back from the Apollo days, there wasn’t one mission that went absolutely perfectly,” Altemus said. “So you have to be adaptable. You have to be innovative, and you have to persevere. And we persevered right up until the last moment.”