Flight control engineers expect to lose contact with the private U.S. lunar lander Odysseus on Tuesday, leaving the mission five days short of its sideways landing, the company behind the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said.
It remains to be seen how much scientific data could be lost as a result of the shortened lifespan of Odysseus, which according to previous estimates from the company and its biggest customer, Nasawould otherwise have operated on the moon for seven to 10 days.
The company’s prediction for a premature end to the mission came as new details emerged about test shortcuts and human error that led to a failure in flight of the spacecraft’s laser-guided rangefinders before its landing last Thursday.
An Intuitive Machines official said the loss of the rangefinders stems from the company’s decision to forgo a pre-launch test fire of the laser system to save time and money during the pre-flight check of Odysseus at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“There were definitely things we could have done to test it and actually fire it. It would have been very time-consuming and very expensive,” Mike Hansen, the company’s head of navigation systems, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. “So it was a risk as a company that we recognized and took that risk.”
On Friday, Intuitive Machines revealed that the laser rangefinders — designed to provide altitude and forward velocity readings to Odysseus’ autonomous navigation system — were unusable because company engineers neglected to unlock the lasers’ safety switch before launch on February 15. The safety lock, similar to a firearm’s safety switch, can only be deactivated manually.
The rangefinder error, detected just hours before final descent, forced flight controllers to improvise an experimental solution to avoid what could have been a catastrophic crash landing.
Hansen, the engineer who produced the software “patch” that fixed the problem, said the company had yet to determine whether the improvised navigation solution, which used an experimental NASA-supplied system on the lander, might be a could be a factor in the spacecraft’s sideways movement. landing.
During its first post-landing news release on Friday, the company said Odysseus caught the bottom of one of its six landing legs on the uneven lunar surface on final descent and tipped over, coming to rest horizontally, apparently resting on a rock.
Executives from Intuitive Machines speculated that the forward speed of the spacecraft upon landing, about twice as fast as expected, may have been a factor in stumbling. But it remained uncertain whether using the original laser rangefinders might have made a difference.
In any case, Odysseus’ sideways attitude greatly limited how much his solar panels were exposed to sunlight, which is needed to recharge his batteries. In addition, two of its antennas were pointed toward the ground, hindering communication with the lander, the company said Friday.
Intuitive Machines executives said at the time that its engineering teams would need more time to determine how the overall mission would be affected.
In an update posted online Monday, the Houston-based company said: “Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light. Based on Earth and Moon positioning, believe our flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning,” five days after landing.
Nasa, which has several research instruments aboard the vehicle, said those payloads are designed to run on solar energy for seven days before the sun sets over the landing site near the moon’s south pole.
Company executives told reporters Friday, the day after Odysseus landed, that its payloads would be able to operate for about nine or 10 days in a “best-case scenario.”
Shares of Intuitive Machines fell 35% on Monday.
Despite its less-than-ideal landing, Odysseus became the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since NASA’s last crewed Apollo mission brought astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt to the lunar surface in 1972.
It was also the first ever lunar landing by a commercially manufactured and manned space vehicle, and the first under Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite this decade, before China sends its own crewed spacecraft there country.
Intuitive Machines said it spent about $100 million on the lander, and received $118 million from NASA under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, a low-budget effort to stimulate competitive commercial trips to the moon.
