US Lands Unmanned 'Odysseus' Spacecraft On Moon (yahoo.com) 29
The first privately built spacecraft has successfully landed on the lunar surface on Thursday. "We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon," said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that operated the Odysseus spacecraft. "Welcome to the moon." From a report: As it approached the surface of the moon, Odysseus lost contact with NASA, resulting in several anxious minutes for those who worked on the joint project. But after approximately 15 minutes of searching, officials confirmed that they were once again receiving signals from the spacecraft. "A commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched up on a Space X rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments and bearing the dream of a new adventure, a new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership, well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after contact had been reestablished. "Today for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon."
Altemus had estimated that Odysseus had an 80% chance of successfully landing on the moon, citing previous failed attempts as an advantage. "We've stood on the shoulders of everybody who's tried before us," Altemus said. It was the first American mission to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft landing there. While it was a private mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. And the U.S. space agency provided streaming video of the landing.
Altemus had estimated that Odysseus had an 80% chance of successfully landing on the moon, citing previous failed attempts as an advantage. "We've stood on the shoulders of everybody who's tried before us," Altemus said. It was the first American mission to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft landing there. While it was a private mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. And the U.S. space agency provided streaming video of the landing.
No fanfare (Score:3)
It's Slashdot... (Score:3)
It's Slashdot that seems to be close to death sadly :( Very few of the old members into science-y stuff are left...
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It's Slashdot that seems to be close to death sadly :( Very few of the old members into science-y stuff are left...
very few people period. Comments use to always be in the thousands, now its rare to get 100 comments, with normal being 30-50 range...
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" Very few of the old members into science-y stuff are left..."
Today the "/." effect is much like a gentle evening breeze vs. gale force winds.
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I suppose it's because soft landing on the Moon has been done before, and while this is the first privately developed lander, in practice the previous NASA ones were engineered under contract by private companies as well as NASA staff.
Still, congratulations to them. It may be the start of a new era where it becomes commercially possible to put stuff on the Moon.
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It's also because this was basically done with less media savvy than NASA could even come up with in the late 60s.
They couldn't have figured out how to get a camera onto the thing so we could actually see it land, or crash? How have we still not seen lunar pictures hours after?
No kidding it's mostly a non-story - the only art they have associated with it is pictures and video of people crowded into a room cheering. We saw enough of that in the 1970s.
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Penelope is quite happy, I'm sure (Score:2)
Or maybe not, since Odysseus did not land in Ithaka.
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Did it land on its feet? (Score:2)
There aren't any photos, and "We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon," makes me worry that all they can see is a close-up of the ground!
Re:Did it land on its feet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that it was a totally automated landing and that its own lidar sensors were broken such that it had to use the ones on a NASA payload to complete the landing, it could well be that it has landed in a deepish crater -- which would explain the very weak radio-signal. The walls of that crater could be blocking the signal. This is because landing on the South Pole means that earth is very low on the horizon so it doesn't take much of a hill to get in the way of the signal.
Why land in a dead zone when the last km telemetry (Score:1)
Could someone explain this to me? If you're going to land a prototype autonomous vehicle on the moon, understandably there's a good chance of failure on the first try. Why then would you choose to land at the pole where (as they made clear beforehand) you totally expect to lose communication near the surface? In the case of a crash or even a soft landing followed by a rollover, they would have got zero telemetry from the final descent. But that's precisely the data you need to understand what went wrong an
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Because landings on the "face" of the Moon (i.e., the broad regions we can see from Earth; where Apollo landings occurred) has already been done. Here, they are trying for something new. Sure, they are a startup, and there was a hig
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I don't see why landing near the moon's south pole is any more challenging than landing at 40 degrees south latitude, as Surveyor 7 did--in an ejecta field from the crater Tycho. The chosen landing site for Odysseus was visible from Earth, unlike the site the Chinese chose a year or two ago--on the far side.
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It's not beyond the realm of possibility that you might land in a place with diminished line-of-sight transmission to Earth from a polar landing on a body covered with impact craters. NASA knew this in the 1960s which is why they used the CSM as a radio relay and high-gain transmitter for the lander, and they weren't even trying for the pole - they were right on the Earth-facing side of the moon, within a stripe centered on the equator.
They couldn't have carried a comm relay satellite with it that they dro
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Re: Did it land on its feet? (Score:1)
ChatGPT is still generating the video (Score:2)
Generating realistic videos without any dragons and pink elephants flying in the background takes some effort.
It isn't as simple as shooting the Apollo footage in a studio back then.
Finally, after 50 years...we have returned (Score:3)
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Why are you complaining? We got the purple hair.
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Manned moon landings were exciting, but had no purpose other than to show US is better than USSR.
Unmanned moon landings are useful for science, and apparently for delivering sculptures to the surface of the moon. However, unlikely to be worth the cost, but now we need to show US is almost as smart as India and China.
nope (Score:1, Troll)
Nope, the US did not land it. Some company did. A company based in the US. Don't give credit where not due.
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NASA--a US Federal agency--was heavily involved. It not only provided a great deal of funding, but also expertise and logistics. I think the US does indeed get some credit here.