Company officials reported on Wednesday that the initial private American spacecraft that landed on the moon suffered a broken leg upon touchdown and was at risk of losing power.

The photos were released on Wednesday by Intuitive Machines, the company responsible for constructing the lander. These images, taken six days after the landing, revealed that one of the six legs of the spacecraft had been damaged. Due to the lander’s excessive speed during descent, it slid and flipped upon reaching the moon’s south pole, resulting in complications with communication and power. Its planned operational duration was at least one week.

The Chief Executive Officer, Steve Altemus, announced that the lander, known as Odysseus, was still operational and using solar energy, but it is anticipated to lose power. On Wednesday night, the company stated that the lander could potentially continue functioning into Thursday.

According to Altemus, when the end arrives, the flight controllers will ensure that Odie is tucked in for the cold moonlit night. After two to three weeks, when the lunar night passes, they will attempt to reestablish communication.

There is uncertainty about whether Odysseus will awaken, according to Mission Director Tim Crain. The intense cold during the lunar night may cause damage to the electronics and cause the batteries to fail.

According to Crain on X, formerly known as Twitter, the lunar night should not be taken lightly. It’s like leaving your beloved electronics outside for 14 consecutive nights in Antarctica.

The recent lunar landing was the United States’ first in over five decades, and the second to be achieved through NASA’s commercial program for delivering supplies to the moon. This accomplishment was a significant success compared to a competing lander that experienced a fuel leak and ultimately crashed back to Earth last month.

Due to a sudden change from the lander’s unresponsive navigation system to NASA’s untested guidance lasers onboard, Odysseus veered off course by 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) and landed at a higher altitude than intended. As a result, it descended too rapidly and impacted with greater force than expected, as reported by Altemus. The 14-foot (4.3-meter) lander briefly stood upright with its engine firing before gradually toppling onto a slight incline.

A worker’s mistake prior to takeoff rendered the lander’s navigation system inoperable.

According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the Odysseus mission has been deemed successful. This is due to the fact that all six of the agency’s experiments on the lander are still operational as of Wednesday morning, even though the mission was expected to only last for eight days. However, Nelson pointed out that there is a significant contrast between landing a crew and landing a group of instruments.

NASA gave Intuitive Machines $118 million to transport their experiments to the rocky and shaded southern pole. This is the location where NASA has intentions to have their astronauts land in the future, as part of the Artemis project, which is named after Apollo’s mythological sibling.

It was the first moon landing of a U.S. spacecraft since the Apollo program. NASA safely landed 12 astronauts on the moon from 1969 through 1972, then withdrew from surface operations until Odysseus’ arrival last Thursday.

Odysseus brought along a United States flag from the Apollo era that was given by NASA. The lander also had objects from various customers, such as new insulated jackets from Columbia Sportswear, small sculptures of the moon made by Jeff Koons, and a set of cameras from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The cameras were later ejected on Tuesday in an unsuccessful effort to capture images of the lander from a sideways perspective.

Reworded: Intuitive Machines made history as the first private company to successfully land on the moon, a milestone previously accomplished by only five countries. Just last month, Japan became the most recent country to achieve a moon landing, although its lander tipped over on its side. Fortunately, Japan’s space agency reported that the lander managed to survive a lunar night this week.

Joel Kearns from NASA emphasized that the U.S. landing was a preliminary test for returning to the moon, and that there are more commercial missions to come.

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Source: wral.com