Another month, another day, another attempt on the moon.
The launch of a robotic lunar lander is scheduled for the early hours of Thursday, a day after a technical glitch delayed the first launch attempt. If all goes well, it will be the first American spacecraft to gently touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.
It is also the latest private attempt to send spacecraft to the moon. Previous attempts all failed. But the company responsible for the latest effort, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is optimistic.
“I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to soft land on the moon,” said Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines. “We have carried out the tests. We tested and tested and tested. As many tests as possible.”
When does it start and how can I watch?
The Intuitive Machines lander, named Odysseus, is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:05 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The weather is expected to be favorable, with a 10 percent chance of conditions that would prevent launch.
SpaceX and NASA will stream coverage of the launch starting at 12:20 a.m. Eastern Time.
SpaceX announced late Tuesday that it was postponing a launch attempt until Wednesday morning. The company said in a post on
If another technical problem or bad weather delays the launch, SpaceX can try again on Friday.
When and where is the landing?
If the launch occurs this week, landing will occur on February 22 near a crater called Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite crater of the larger Malapert crater, named after Charles Malapert, a 17th-century Belgian astronomer is.)
Odysseus will enter orbit around the Moon about 24 hours before the attempted landing.
The landing site, about 185 miles from the South Pole on the far side of the moon, is relatively flat and an easy place for a spacecraft to land. No American spacecraft has ever landed at the south pole of the moon, which is the focus of many space agencies and companies because it may be rich in frozen water.
How big is the spaceship?
Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C and named this particular lander Odysseus. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, approximately 14 feet high and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines points out that the lander’s body is about the size of an old British telephone box – like the Tardis in the science fiction television show Doctor Who.
At launch, the lander weighs about 4,200 pounds with a full fuel load.
What goes to the moon?
NASA is the lead customer for the Intuitive Machines flight; It will pay the company $118 million to deliver its payloads. NASA also spent an additional $11 million developing and building the six instruments on the flight:
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A laser retroreflector array to reflect laser beams fired from Earth.
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A LIDAR instrument to precisely measure the spacecraft’s altitude and speed as it descends to the lunar surface.
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A stereo camera to record video of the dust cloud kicked up by the lander’s engines during landing.
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A low-frequency radio receiver for measuring the effects of charged particles near the lunar surface on radio signals.
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A beacon, Lunar Node-1, demonstrating an autonomous navigation system.
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An instrument in the fuel tank that uses radio waves to measure how much fuel is left in the tank.
The lander also carries several other payloads, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida; a precursor instrument for a future lunar telescope; and an art project by Jeff Koons.
Wasn’t there just another American spaceship on its way to the moon?
On January 8, Astrobotic Technology sent its Peregrine lander toward the moon. But a propulsion system malfunction shortly after takeoff prevented any possibility of landing. Ten days later, as Peregrine returned to Earth, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The goal of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the moon, rather than NASA building and operating its own lunar landers.
“We have always viewed these initial CLPS deliveries as something of a learning experience,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a press conference Tuesday.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much more cost-effective, allowing it to send more missions more often as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon as part of its Artemis program.
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2024-02-15 01:17:05
www.nytimes.com
