“I have bitten every single one of my nails,” said CSIRO astrophysicist Dr Jane Kaczmarek,a senior scientist at Parkes who tracked the lander’s high-speed trajectory.
The landing was delayed by about an hour after communications with its landing radar system malfunctioned,forcing ground control to make an 11th-hour switch to another NASA instrument on board called the navigation doppler lidar.
“They were able to use that for an unintended purpose as a secondary lander,which is amazing to do that in two hours,” Kaczmarek said.
“It is on the moon,and it is talking. That is a huge,huge accomplishment.”
Intuitive Machines is waiting for Murriyang – the most powerful telescope involved in the mission’s global tracking system – to re-establish contact with the lander once it comes into Australia’s field of view from about 9.30pm.
The six-legged Odysseus spacecraft landed on the rim of a crater 300 kilometres from the south pole called Malapert A,where NASA astronauts mayland in 2026 with Artemis III.
A radar camera was designed to pop off the lander on descent to capture images of the craft and the lunar dust kicked up by its thrusters. “That will be some of the early science coming back from the moon,” Kaczmarek said.
The moon’s south pole is icy,craggy and dark. But it’s also of enormous scientific interest.
“There are these deeper craters in the south pole,some surfaces of the moon that are pretty much always in shadow. So you can have perpetual ice,and ice means water,and water means potential life,” Kaczmarek said. (Human life,that is.)
“When we’re thinking about returning people to the moon for more than a day visit,we need to start thinking about resources. Where’s the water the astronauts are going to drink?”
The 64-metre telescope is tuned to observe unfathomably distant galaxies and its signal is now 10,000 times stronger than it was when Parkes astronomers assisted the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago. Tracing the lander so close to Earth was a cinch.
“We can see[the lander] very,very brightly compared to the things we usually study that are many,many light years away,” Kaczmarek said.
“I think we’re learning how to adapt to space being the future again. We’re relearning that we can be more than just an astrophysical observatory.”
Odysseus,backed by a contract with NASA to help explore the moon,is ferrying instruments that will scrutinise the lunar landscape,space weather,radio astronomy and navigation data to guide future crewed landings.
After launching from Florida on February 15,Odysseus detached from its SpaceX rocket,snapped a selfie featuring Tropical Cyclone Lincoln forming over Australia’s north,and entered lunar orbit about 2.20am on Thursday (Sydney time).
The landing about 10.30am Friday morning (AEDT) was the most dangerous leg of the mission and followed a string of disastrous lunar landing attempts by other agencies.
In 2019,an Israeli lander was obliterated when it hurtled into the lunar surface at 500km/h. Tokyo start-up ispace’s landercrashed last April,and in September,aRussian craft smashed into the lunar south pole and blighted the moon with a new 10-metre crater.
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Just last month,anotherNASA-backed commercial mission worth $161 million dubbed Peregrine ended with the spacecraft burning up over Point Nemo in the Pacific after a fuel leak.
January also saw the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency successfully reach the moon with the SLIM lunar lander. But until Odysseus,no commercial operation had pulled it off.
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