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Odysseus Moon Lander Is Powering Down After ‘Very Successful’ Mission

The history-making spacecraft landed on its side, but it spent nearly a week sending data and images back from the moon—and engineers may try to make contact again after the lunar night is over

Will Sullivan

Daily Correspondent

A spacecraft on the surface of the moon
An image showing the Odysseus lander on the moon's surface. A piece of a landing leg has broken off on the left of the image. The gear still protected Odysseus as it touched down. Intuitive Machines

After about a week on the surface of the moon, the pioneering Odysseus lunar lander—the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since 1972—is powering down. But Intuitive Machines, the company behind Odysseus, hopes to awaken the spacecraft in a couple of weeks, after the lunar night passes, officials said in a press conference with NASA on Wednesday.

While the spacecraft landed on its side at a 30-degree angle, it was still able to operate on the lunar surface and transmit scientific data. As of 10:20 a.m. Eastern time Thursday morning, Odysseus was “still kicking,” according to an update from Intuitive Machines.

“We’ve conducted a very successful mission to this point, and we expect to go to the completion of the mission as planned,” Steve Altemus, chief executive officer of Intuitive Machines, said during the conference.

The company has received data from all the commercial and NASA payloads on Odysseus, which was carrying six NASA science investigations and technology demonstrations.

The Intuitive Machines landing is the first of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions to make it to the moon. Through this initiative to partner with American companies, the agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million for the mission and could pay as much as $2.6 billion in CLPS contracts through 2028.

Guidance and navigation data collected from Odysseus, as well as propulsion and performance data, will inform future missions, Altemus said on Wednesday. Two more Intuitive Machines missions are planned for later this year.

Odysseus launched to space on February 15 and started its descent to the lunar south pole on February 22. During landing, a laser instrument that was meant to measure the spacecraft’s altitude and velocity wasn’t working, so the team had to improvise, using an experimental NASA instrument on board to collect data. It turned out that a switch for the laser guidance system hadn’t been flipped before takeoff, according to the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport.

Engineers quickly rewrote the necessary software to use the NASA instrument as Odysseus orbited the moon. But due to an oversight in the programming, the spacecraft was unable to calculate how high it was above the surface during landing, though it did use other data to make informed estimates, per the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang. On Friday, Intuitive Machines announced the spacecraft had tipped over.

Teams determined Odysseus had touched down about a mile (1.5 kilometers) outside the zone they’d aimed for, and at a higher elevation.

As a result, Odysseus landed harder than expected and skidded with the engine still firing. At least one of its legs broke. Then, the vehicle gently tipped onto its side, landing near a crater on a 12-degree slope atop some equipment on the side of the spacecraft. Together, this created an angle of 30 degrees.

With the spacecraft on its side, some of its antennae weren’t able to point toward Earth, and the solar panels weren’t facing the ideal direction, according to USA Today’s Eric Lagatta. But Odysseus was still able to generate solar power and send scientific data and images home, according to Intuitive Machines. More than 350 megabits of data have already been downloaded.

For this reason, Altemus said the mission had been an “unqualified success.”

“This is the first time in the 21st century that an organization in the United States has landed equipment on the surface of the moon, and we’re getting data back from that equipment,” Joel Kearns, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration, said at the press conference.

The second Intuitive Machines flight is also intended to land at the moon’s south pole and will use a drill and spectrometer to analyze materials below the lunar surface. The third will investigate the moon’s Reiner Gamma swirl, an abstract-looking surface feature that has a magnetic field.

Ahead of these other endeavors and NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, the journey of Odysseus was a test flight of sorts.

Odysseus is “a pathfinder, both for the more complicated and sophisticated robotics science landing missions that’ll occur in the future, and a pathfinder to get data for taking our human explorers back to the moon and to places on the moon that humans have never been before,” Kearns said at the conference.

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Will Sullivan

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next.