NASA and Intuitive Machines may have made history with the recent first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years, but it looks like the mission will come to an end much sooner than hoped. As the Odysseus lander came in for its descent last week it caught on the surface and tipped over onto its side. Now, Intuitive Machines has announced that it expects the lander to stop communications on the morning of Tuesday, February 27 — cutting the mission shorter than the week or more on the surface that was originally hoped for.
Intuitive Machines also released a low resolution image taken after the spacecraft pitched over, showing its view of the moon’s surface:
“After understanding the end-to-end communication requirements, Odysseus sent images from the lunar surface of its vertical descent to its Malapert A landing site, representing the furthest south any vehicle has been able to land on the Moon and establish communication with ground controllers,” the company wrote in an update.
The problem seems to be that the solar panels of the lander will shortly stop collecting sunlight, so the lander will soon run out of power. “Based on Earth and Moon positioning, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning,” the company wrote.
In addition to this update, NASA also shared an image of the lander on the moon’s surface captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. It shows the dot of the lander as seen from orbit, from an altitude of around 56 miles above the surface:
This shows that the lander is in a relatively steep crater of 12 degrees, which could have contributed to challenges with the landing.
It remains to be seen how much data the Odysseus lander will be able to collect and send to Earth with its limited supply of power. It’s also not fully known to what extent the tipping of the lander has impacted the payloads on board, although in an update last week Intuitive Machines did say that at least some of the instruments were operational and collecting data.
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