SLIM and Odysseus: The First Private Moon Lander to Land near the Malapert A Crater
A private US lunar landers is scheduled to stop working on Tuesday after its mission ended in failure.
The Houston company that built and flew the spaceship said Monday that it will continue collecting data until the sun goes down. Based on the positioning of the moon and earth, officials expect that to happen Tuesday morning. That’s two to three days short of the week or so that NASA and other customers had been counting on.
Problems with landing positions were encountered by both SLIM and Odysseus, the US vehicle that became the first privately built Moon lander to complete a soft touchdown. It is as hard to land on the Moon as it has ever been.
Based on photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flying overhead, Odysseus landed within a mile or so (1.5 kilometers) of its intended target near the Malapert A crater, just 185 miles or so (300 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole.
The landers ended up in a crater with a slope of 12 degrees. That’s the closest a spacecraft has ever come to the south pole, an area of interest because of suspected frozen water in the permanently shadowed craters there.
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver several experiments to the surface in order to land astronauts in this region. Other customers had items as well.
Odysseus flung off on its side and failed to fly on the lunar transport system for 11 years. The failure of Astrobotic Technology
Instead of landing on its back, Odysseus came down on its side, hurting communication with Earth. spotty communications were caused by some antennascovered up by the toppled lander and those still exposed ending up near the ground. The solar panels ended up far too close to the surface, not ideal for the hilly terrain. Only a week was available to operate on the surface before the long night set in.
Russia, China, India, Japan and the U.S. have all successfully landed on the moon. Japan’s lander ended up on the wrong side last month.
Despite its slanted landing, Intuitive Machines became the first private business to join the elite group. Another U.S. company, Astrobotic Technology, gave it a try last month, but didn’t make it to the moon because of a fuel leak.
Intuitive Machines almost failed, too. The ground teams didn’t turn on the switch for the lander’s navigation lasers before it lifted off. Flight controllers had to use a NASA laser-navigating device that was simply an experiment after Odysseus was circling the moon.
Twelve Apollo astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 through 1972. After putting an occasional satellite around the moon, NASA did not make another moon landing until last month. Astrobotic’s failed flight was the first instance in which NASA has attempted to promote commercial lunar transportation.
Landing the JAXA Lunar Lander: Shinichiro Sakai, Is There a Chance to Land?
SLIM is not designed for the temperature on the lunar surface to fall to minus 130 degrees Celsius. JAXA engineers were hoping it would make it through the night, but their message home was a nice surprise, says SLIM project manager Shinichiro Sakai. “We knew that some of NASA’s Surveyors survived, so we felt we should also have some chance,” he says.
He thinks the lander’s communications system is working. The JAXA took to social media to announce that it was going to use a multiband spectroscopic camera to take new images.
Extreme heat can cause problems for SLIM during the lunar day. With the Sun high, its radio electronics overheat very quickly and Sakai says the team will need to wait for the temperature to cool later in the week before they restart scientific investigation.
When electronic circuit boards are too cold or warm, they can fail because they are made with different materials and the contraction rates are different. “It can generate significant twisting and stretching forces, and cause components or joints to crack or be pulled apart,” he says.
The two recent spacecraft were built within many constraints, in particular cost, which places limits on their size and technology. He says that the two landers got almost everything right, but went awry in the final moments.
The teams obtained a lot of information that will inform future attempts. The way to successfully land is to try and learn from your past errors, says Barber.