The United States has returned to the Moon. More than half a century after the last mission of the Apollo program, an artifact with the Stars and Stripes flag arrived on Earth’s natural satellite on Thursday. He did it with the help of a private company, Intuitive Machines, the first to achieve the milestone of successfully landing on the moon. The company has its command center in Houston (Texas), the city where the Apollo 17the last American device to reach the Moon, in 1972. The module Odysseus It landed on the surface of the satellite somewhat behind the schedules initially managed by NASA, the American space agency, due to some technical problems. Even so, with the suspense inherent to the occasion, he has arrived on time for his date with history. Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, has had the opportunity to imitate the most famous phrase of the space conquest: “This feat is a great step forward for all of humanity,” he said.
After the moon landing countdown reached zero, there were a few minutes of uncertainty until communication was recovered and confirmation was obtained that Odysseus has landed on the moon. “Our team is on the surface of the Moon,” said the mission director. In the command room, restlessness and nervousness were perceived, according to the signal transmitted by NASA and the company, until victory was declared and applause broke out.
There has been no immediate confirmation that everything is working as planned, but NASA also celebrated the moon landing: “Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the United States has returned to the Moon. Today, for the first time in human history, an American commercial company has launched and led the journey there. And today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships. Congratulations to everyone involved in this big, bold quest for intuitive machines, to SpaceX and right here at NASA. What a triumph! Odysseus has taken the Moon,” said Bill Nelson before copying Neil Armstrong.
The apparent success of Odysseus It comes after the recent fiasco of a Japanese and an American mission, the last chapters of a few complicated months in the space race. The Intuitive Machines moon landing module was launched into space by a rocket from Space X, the company founded and run by Elon Musk. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was powered for the first time with methane, a fuel that China had already managed to use successfully.
The device, a hexagonal prism with six landing legs more than four meters high and 1.5 meters wide, has landed on a plain outside the Malapert A crater. The lander fired its engine on the face on Wednesday. back of the Moon while it was out of contact with the Earth. Flight controllers at the company’s headquarters in Houston had to wait for the ship to emerge to know if the lander was in orbit or drifting aimlessly away, in one of the most delicate moments of the mission.
On Thursday, controllers lowered the orbit of the device from about 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) to six miles, in a crucial maneuver on the opposite side of Earth’s natural satellite. They then targeted the descent near the Moon’s south pole. Just over a kilometer from the landing site, the ship pivoted in a vertical position and the sensors looked for a safe place to land. The original laser instrument that was to have guided the landing failed, so a NASA-provided one traveling as an experimental payload was used instead. That caused the device to orbit the Moon once again, which delayed the landing by two hours.
In the last 15 meters of the descent, the device stopped using the camera and altitude measurement laser so as not to be fooled by the dust raised by the engine exhaust.
The device landed in a dangerous region for a lunar landing, full of craters and cliffs, but considered of high value, because it is believed that these permanently shadowed craters contain frozen water, near the Malapert A crater, 260 kilometers from the lunar south pole. . The crater is named in honor of the 17th century Belgian astronomer Charles Malapert. There, near where India has already successfully landed, it is intended to exploit the gigantic resource of water ice for future space exploration. Astronauts visiting the Moon in the future could use the ice in these craters for drinking water, oxygen, and even fuel. Previous US missions reached the equatorial lunar regions.
Private collaboration
NASA has started to outsource a large part of its missions to private companies and plans to continue doing so. Intuitive Machines is one of 14 suppliers selected to deliver payloads to the Moon through its CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. With this program, it seeks to have American companies carry scientific, exploration and technological loads to the surface and lunar orbit.
In this mission, NASA is the main customer, with half of the 12 payloads it transports Odysseus. It has paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to take its work instruments to the Moon. It is a stereoscopic camera to observe the plume of dust that rises during landing; a radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles on radio signals; an experiment with autonomous navigation capabilities to support future surface and orbital operations; a set of eight retroreflectors that will serve as a permanent position marker on the Moon for decades; a Lidar-based descent and landing sensor, an instrument that works on the same principles as radar, but with a laser (which had to be used in the descent), and a meter that uses radio waves to determine how much propellant fuel remains in the tanks in a low gravity environment.
There are also uploads from clients other than NASA, such as a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and an art project by Jeff Koons.
Intuitive Machines makes history by becoming the first private company to successfully land on the Moon. Three previous non-governmental attempts failed. One corresponded to an American company, another to a Japanese company, and a third to a private, non-profit Israeli initiative. The American Astrobotic Technology tried to send a module last month, but it did not even reach the Moon due to a fuel loss. This module returned in free fall through the atmosphere and burned until disintegrating over the Pacific. All the devices that were on board, from different institutions around the world, were lost with the ship. The probe Hakuto-R, who attempted it in April of last year, gave no signs after the scheduled time for contact, which was interpreted as having crashed. A similar attempt launched by a group of Israelis crashed in 2019.
In January, Japan became the fifth nation to land on the Moon, but its ship landed on its side. The Japanese SLIM probe landed with the thrusters facing upwards and the solar panels turned to the side, so its functions were seriously compromised. The other countries that, thanks to government initiatives, have reached the satellite are the United States, the former Soviet Union, China and India.
With missions like the current one, NASA aims to obtain new knowledge about the lunar environment to support future manned missions within the framework of the Artemis campaign. This mission was IM-1. Intuitives Machines intends to launch the IM-2 mission at the end of this year and IM-3 in 2025. For now, NASA has had to postpone its plans to return people to the Moon, precisely due to the accumulation of technical problems with several of the companies involved. The last time astronauts set foot on the Moon was in December 1972, with the Apollo 17. Half a century after Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt’s moonwalk, the space adventure continues.
You can follow MATERIA in Facebook, X e Instagramclick here to receive our weekly newsletter.