The United States returns to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. At 6:24 pm Eastern Time, the robot "Odysseus" landed autonomously on the lunar surface and subsequently established radio communication with the mission control center for 13 minutes.Today's landing of the IM-1 mission is the first U.S. lunar lander mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. It also went down in history as the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to land on the moon.
The process was not smooth sailing, and a somewhat thorny problem was encountered. When the "Nova-C" class lander "Odysseus" (nicknamed "Audi") descended in autonomous mode to a landing site 300 kilometers (190 miles) from the moon's south pole, there was a sense of anxiety in the mission control center.
Part of the reason for the tension was a scheduled communications outage during the landing phase, but there were also technical factors. During the eight-day journey to the moon, the onboard landing navigation system malfunctioned, so flight engineers had to install a software patch that connected the lander system to NASA's Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL) experiment for precision speed and range sensing, which was part of the commercial payload.
Therefore, what was originally just a demonstration of a new laser-guided landing navigation technology was suddenly put into critical use.
Two minutes after landing, Odysseus did not send the expected signal. Seeing that Odysseus was about to malfunction again, mission control initiated various procedures and sent an alert to the Gurnhilley ground station in the UK to look for any signs of the aircraft's survival.
Subsequently, at 6:37 pm ET, Odysseus' builder, Intuitive Systems, confirmed that it had made contact with the lander at its landing site in Marapet Crater A.
According to a spokesperson for Intuitive Machines, "Odysseus has a new home."