2024-02-29 00:58:01
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The first private U.S. spacecraft to reach the lunar surface broke a leg during the moon landing and subsequently capsized, and by Wednesday night it had just a few hours left. power before shutting down prematurely.
Six days following the moon landing, Intuitive Machines, the company that built the probe, released new photographs in which it can be seen that at least one of the six legs of the spacecraft is broken. The probe descended too fast, slipped and flipped when it made contact with the surface near the Moon’s south pole last Thursday, affecting its power and transmission capacity. It was supposed to run for at least a week.
The company’s CEO, Steve Altemus, said the probe, named Odysseus, was still generating solar energy despite being on its side. Later Wednesday, he added that flight controllers will “wrap Odie up for the cold moon night,” so that in three weeks, when the lunar night ends, they can regain contact.
Mission leader Tim Crain doesn’t know if Odysseus will wake up. The extreme cold of the lunar night might affect its circuitry and drain its batteries.
A disconnection Wednesday night would mean a premature end to the first American lunar landing in more than 50 years, which is only the second mission under NASA’s commercial lunar travel program. But it far surpassed the failed attempt by a competitor last month, whose probe suffered a fuel leak and plummeted back to Earth.
Due to a last-minute switch of the probe’s navigation system to NASA’s experimental guidance lasers, Odysseus came within 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) of landing on the expected flat terrain, and ended up a greater elevation than anticipated. As a result, it descended too fast and hit the surface with more force than its paws might withstand, according to Altemus.
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