The main U.S. lunar spacecraft in half a century, Odysseus, lost power and became inactive on Thursday. during a freezing lunar evening. concluding its core mission after a disproportionate landing anomaly a week prior disrupted its tasks and scientific objectives. Instinctive Machines, the Texas-based aerospace company contracted by NASA for $118 million to construct and operate Odysseus, reported receiving a final “farewell transmission” from the spacecraft before it went dark in the moon’s south pole region.
Earlier, the company announced plans to have Odysseus “phone home” to their ground control center in Houston. if it receives sufficient solar power to awaken in three weeks with the next lunar dawn. Despite initially expecting battery depletion on Wednesday night, reports indicated that Odysseus remained operational on Thursday morning
On Feb. 15, we launched the six-legged Nova-C-class lander, standing 13 feet (4 m) tall and shaped like a hexagonal chamber From NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket provided by SpaceX. It arrived in lunar orbit six days later.
Odysseus encountered a last-minute navigational error during its descent to the lunar surface, leading to a precarious landing and hindering its operations. The company attributed the navigational issue to human error, stating that flight status teams failed to manually open a safety switch before launch.
Despite communication challenges and difficulties in keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA managed to extract data from all six of Odysseus’s science payloads. Both Instinctive Machines and NASA praised the scientific achievements and the successful “soft” lunar landing, marking a significant milestone in lunar exploration.
Odysseus’s landing also marked a historic moment as the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a commercially made and operated spacecraft since NASA’s last Apollo mission in 1972. It also marked the beginning of NASA’s Artemis program, aiming to send more commercial robot landers to the moon ahead of a planned return of astronauts later this decade.
The United States remains the only country to have ever sent humans to the lunar surface, while only four other countries—Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan—have achieved a “soft” moon landing.
