A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the south pole of the moon on Thursday (February 22), the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century and the first ever achieved entirely by the private sector.
The six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, touched down at about 6:23 p.m. EST (2323 GMT), the company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast of the landing from Intuitive Machines’ mission operations center in Houston.
The landing, one day after the spacecraft reached lunar orbit and a week after its launch from Florida, was confirmed by signals beamed back some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) to mission control.
But communication with the vehicle took several minutes to re-establish, and the initial signal was faint, leaving mission control uncertain as to the precise condition and position of the lander, according to flight controllers heard in the webcast.
The spacecraft was not designed to provide live video of the event.
Touchdown came after an 11th-hour glitch with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system that required engineers on the ground to employ a work-around solution.
The vehicle is carrying a suite of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several commercial customers designed to operate for seven days on solar energy before the sun sets over the polar landing site.
Thursday’s landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA’s last crewed moon mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
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