Visit the Times live blog for the latest information on the voyage of Odysseus’ moon shipincluding an updated landing time.
On Wednesday morning, a robotic lunar lander launched by a Houston company moved closer to reaching the moon.
The company, Intuitive Machines, announced that the Odysseus spacecraft fired its engine for six minutes and 48 seconds, slowing it down enough to be pulled by the moon’s gravity into a circular orbit 57 miles above the surface.
On Thursday, he is scheduled to land on the moon. If all goes well, it will become the first private spacecraft to make a soft landing there and the first American mission to land there since Apollo 17 in 1972.
When is the landing and how can I track it?
Ulysses is expected to land on the lunar surface at 4:24 p.m. eastern time on Thursday. (Late Thursday morning, Intuitive Machines announced it was extending the landing time by about an hour, also noting that it had raised the spacecraft’s orbit.)
Although this is a private mission, the main customer is NASA, which paid $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. NASA TV will broadcast coverage of the landing starting at 4 pm on Thursday. The Times is providing updates on the landing live in a blog.
Where is the spaceship going to land?
Ulysses is aiming for a point in the south polar region, a flat plain outside the crater Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite crater of the larger crater Malapert, which was named after Charles Malapert, a 17th-century Belgian astronomer century.)
The landing site is about 185 miles from the Moon’s south pole.
Some of these craters in this area remain in perpetual shadow and are a special area of interest because water ice has been found in them. Previous US missions to the moon have landed in the equatorial regions.
How will Odysseus land?
The spacecraft will fire its engine so that the circular orbit changes to an elliptical one and will fall within about six miles of the Moon’s surface. From this point on through the landing sequence, Ulysses will operate entirely on its own. After driving for an hour, the engine will restart and the spacecraft will begin its powered descent. It should slow down from its initial speed of about 4,000 miles per hour.
Ulysses will track its position via cameras, matching crater patterns to stored maps and measuring its altitude by bouncing laser beams off the surface.
About 1.2 miles from the landing site, the spacecraft will rotate to an upright orientation, with sensors looking for a safe spot.
For the last 50 feet or so of descent, Ulysses will rely solely on its inertial measurement units, which act as the spacecraft’s inner ear, measuring acceleration forces. It will stop using the camera and altimeter laser to avoid being fooled by the dust from the engine exhaust.
What will the ship do on the moon?
Because solar panels provide the spacecraft’s power, its mission will only last about seven days until the sun sets on the landing site. Then begins a two-week frozen lunar night, and Odysseus was not designed to survive these conditions.
The six NASA instruments carried to the moon by Ulysses and what their tasks are:
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A laser reflector array that bounces laser beams.
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A LIDAR instrument that accurately measures the altitude and speed of the spacecraft as it descends on the lunar surface.
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A stereo camera that will capture video of the dust plume produced by Ulysses’ engines during landing.
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A low-frequency radio receiver that measures the effects of charged particles on radio signals near the lunar surface, providing information that could help design future radio observations on the moon.
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A beacon, Lunar Node-1, that will demonstrate an autonomous navigation system.
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An instrument in the propellant tank that uses radio waves to measure fuel levels.
The aircraft is also carrying 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 artwork by Jeff Koons.
How is the mission going so far?
Mostly very well.
On February 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent Ulysses into orbit toward the moon. After the spacecraft separated, it was successfully activated. An initial engine burn to test the propulsion system was postponed because the liquid oxygen propellant took longer to cool than predicted by ground tests.
Engineers adjusted the ignition procedures and the burn was successfully carried out on 16 February.
Along the way, the spacecraft transmitted pictures taken from both Earth and the Moon.
Flight controllers fired the engine two more times, on February 18 and 20, to fine-tune the spacecraft’s course toward the moon. The second attempt was accurate enough that flight controllers decided to skip a planned third correction.
How big is the spaceship?
Intuitive Machines is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing feet, about 14 feet tall and five feet wide. For fans of “Dr. Who,” the sci-fi TV show, the lander’s body is roughly the size of the Tardis, the time-traveling spaceship that, on the outside, looks like an old British police phone booth.
At launch, with a full propellant load, the lander weighed about 4,200 pounds.
Why doesn’t NASA perform this mission?
Odysseus is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which allows private companies to send experiments to the moon and frees NASA from building and operating its own lunar landers.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to send more missions more often as it prepares for American astronauts to return to the Moon as part of the Artemis program.