The American company Intuitive Machines made history by becoming the first private company to successfully send a space probe to the moon. The successful landing on the night from Thursday to Friday (Romanian time) was the first for the United States since the last flight of Apollo 17 in 51 years, writes news.ro

A space probe called Odyssey has landed near the moon’s south pole, where scientists hope there may be a source of water.

The space module traveled 384,400 km from Earth after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, last Thursday.

The startup Intuitive Machines received a contract from NASA to carry six scientific instruments on board the shuttle, which will help study the surface of the moon and measure radio waves. The Houston company hopes to send another spacecraft in March that will drill to find underground ice

The Odyssey also carries 125 tiny sculptures by American artist Jeff Koons. He hopes they will be the first works of art to reach the surface of the moon.

“What a triumph,” exclaimed Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, in a message after the landing. “Odysseus conquered the moon. This feat is a giant step forward for all of humanity,” he commented, using the words of the first man to walk on the moon more than half a century ago.

“Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the United States returned to the moon. Today, for the first time in human history, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the journey there. And today is a day that demonstrates the strength and perspective of NASA’s commercial partnership. Congratulations to everyone involved in this big and bold mission from Intuitive Machines, SpaceX and right here at NASA,” Nelson said, as quoted by The Guardian.

The module, nicknamed “Odi,” or IM-1, is on the moon’s surface and transmitting, said Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which designed the spacecraft. “Welcome to the moon,” said the company’s CEO after a rather difficult attempt to land on the moon.

Ode’s trip to the moon is designed to assess the lunar environment at the moon’s south pole ahead of NASA’s current plan to send a manned mission there in late 2026.

The February 22 success followed a botched US landing last month and the Peregrine spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere on its way to Earth 10 days later.

India and Japan recently managed to land their own probes on the moon, but with the help of their national space agencies, becoming the fourth and fifth countries respectively to do so, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. But several companies – Israeli, Japanese and American – have so far failed to reproduce the same results. Russia also missed a module landing this summer.

ALIENATION WITH EMOTIONS

Odyssey, a six-legged robotic probe, landed around 23:23 GMT (1:23 Romanian time). As planned, the spacecraft came to rest in a crater called Malapert A near the south pole of the Moon. The landing, a day after the spacecraft entered lunar orbit and a week after launch from Florida, was confirmed by signals sent to flight control.

But according to flight controllers interviewed during the webcast, it took several minutes to re-establish contact with the vehicle and the initial signal was weak, leaving flight control unsure of the condition and exact position of the lander.

The spacecraft was not designed to provide real-time video of the event.

The launch came after a last-minute problem with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system forced engineers on the ground to find an alternative solution.

So, on Thursday, February 22, Texas-based Intuitive Machines successfully landed the first American probe in more than 50 years, becoming the first private company to do so. “We can confirm without a doubt that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and that we are transmitting” a signal, a company representative said during a live video broadcast of the moon landing.

The daring descent, which was fully automated, lasted about an hour. Cameras and lasers were used to control the aircraft in real time. The final descent began from a height of 30 meters. At that moment, a small craft was ejected from the lunar module, equipped with a camera developed at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to capture the moment from the outside.

The vehicle contains a suite of scientific instruments and demonstration technologies for NASA and several commercial customers, designed to run for seven days on solar power before the sun sets over the landing site at the opposite pole.

The uncrewed IM-1 mission was launched to the moon on Wednesday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Thursday’s landing was the first controlled landing of a U.S. spacecraft on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA’s last manned lunar mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.

Odyssey’s arrival also marks the first-ever “light landing” on the Moon by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first by NASA’s Artemis lunar program, as the US rushes to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China sends its own manned spacecraft. ship. there.

NASA plans to send its first manned mission, Artemis, in late 2026 as part of long-term continuous exploration of the Moon and as a stepping stone to possible manned missions to Mars. The initiative is focused on the south pole of the moon, in part because there is believed to be an abundance of frozen water that could be used to support life and produce rocket fuel.

A series of small landers like Odysseus are expected to pave the way for missions under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, designed to deliver instruments and equipment to the moon at a lower cost than the US space agency’s traditional build-and-launch method . these vehicles.