NASA is apparently giving its ice-scouting moon rover mission another try. The space agency has announced that the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) project — which was called off last year after a series of delays and mounting costs — could catch a ride to the moon with Blue Origin in 2027 under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Blue Origin must first plan and demonstrate how the delivery at the lunar surface would work, and if it’s all to NASA’s liking, VIPER will be ferried by the company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.
Blue Origin hasn’t yet attempted a moon landing, but the first opportunity for its Blue Moon Mark 1 lander is expected to launch later this year as part of another CLPS delivery. That mission will also help to inform NASA’s decision about VIPER’s rideshare, which would use a second Mark 1 lander that the agency says is already in production. If VIPER does eventually make it to the moon, it’ll be deployed in the extreme environment of the lunar South Pole to search for water ice and other resources that could support future missions.
“This delivery could show us where ice is most likely to be found and easiest to access, as a future resource for humans,” said Joel Kearns, Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “And by studying these sources of lunar water, we also gain valuable insight into the distribution and origin of volatiles across the solar system, helping us better understand the processes that have shaped our space environment and how our inner solar system has evolved.”
Intuitive Machines’ private lander stumbled on its way down to the lunar surface and is possibly leaning over on a rock on the Moon. The vehicle is still operational and flight engineers are working to gather more data on its less than ideal position, the company said.
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Odysseus landed on the Moon on Thursday, overcoming a glitch that jeopardized its ability to safely touch down. Although it made it to the surface, Odie’s landing was not so smooth, with the vehicle getting one of its legs caught, causing it to tip over on its side and possibly end up laying on a rock, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus revealed during a press conference on Friday.
“Yesterday we thought we were upright,” Altemus said. “When we worked through the night to get other telemetry data, we noticed that in this direction [pointing downwards] is where we’re seeing the tank residuals and so that’s what tells us with fairly certain terms the orientation of the vehicle.”
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus explaining the orientation of the vehicle. Screenshot: NASA TV
“It was a quite a spicy seven-day mission to get to the Moon,” Altemus added, and he is not wrong. Intuitive Machines was racing to the lunar surface to become the first private company to land on the Moon following a series of failures by others. In January, Astrobotic failed in its attempt to reach the Moon due to a valve issue with its Peregrine spacecraft. In April 2023, Japan’s ispace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the lunar surface, and Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet lander met a similar fate in April 2019.
This time around, the Moon still put up a fight. Just hours before its scheduled descent, Odysseus’ laser rangefinders, which are designed to assess the Moon’s terrain to identify a safe landing spot, malfunctioned. In order to help guide the lander to the surface, flight engineers uploaded a software patch to repurpose a secondary laser on a NASA instrument that’s on board Odysseus.
The Houston-based company seemingly broke the lunar curse with Thursday’s touchdown, despite it not being entirely perfect. With the lander on its side, it is still receiving sunlight to its horizontal solar panel, and all of its active payloads are facing away from the surface and could therefore be able to operate from the Moon, according to Altemus.
Intuitive Machines secured a faint signal from its lander but it is still waiting on more data to be downlinked from Odysseus. Some of the antennas that the lander is designed to use to communicate with Earth, however, are pointed downward, which limits the mission’s ability to transmit data.
The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to have a constant flow of private landers headed to the Moon to deliver government-owned and commercial payloads. With each private trip that launches to the Moon, NASA and its partner companies collect data to feed into the next mission.
“As landers come down, we would ideally like to have them come straight down,” Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said during the press conference. “But because there’s errors in the operations of the system, you wind up going laterally…[we’re trying to] get an understanding of that lateral movement so that the system can counteract that and zero out that lateral motion to come straight down.”
Odysseus is designed to operate on the lunar surface for around a week, or until the Sun sets on the Moon’s south polar region. Intuitive Machines is hoping that the lander’s solar panels will be able to receive enough sunlight in their current position to power the lander through the coming days.
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Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft touched down yesterday on the lunar surface . . . sideways. CEO Steve Altemus confirmed during a press conference Friday that, while it wasn’t a perfect landing, it’s nothing short of a miracle the spacecraft landed intact at all.
Using a small model of the lander, Altemus demonstrated how engineers believe the spacecraft, called Odysseus, made its descent given the most recent telemetry data.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Altemus said. “We’re downloading data from the buffers in the spacecraft and commanding the spacecraft.”
Intuitive Machines confirmed yesterday that the lander touched down on the surface at 5:24 p.m. Central Time — making the company the first to put a privately built spacecraft on the moon — but many details about the vehicle’s health were unknown. Part of the reason for that is because the onboard camera, an instrument called EagleCam, was powered down during landing. Without images, engineers had to rely on other data to determine the lander’s orientation after it landed.
Even now, the company is continuing to reconstruct the series of events that led up to the historic landing. The company originally thought Odysseus was actually upright, but Altemus said that was based on “stale” telemetry data. Currently available information is indicating that the spacecraft was indeed vertical at touchdown, but because it was also moving horizontally — and a little too quickly — it’s likely that one of its legs caught on something or broke, causing it to tilt over.
The good news is that most of the onboard payloads are not on the downward-facing panel — the only one that does not need to operate on the lunar surface. The company was able to confirm that many of the major subsystems — including the solar arrays providing power to the spacecraft and the onboard payloads — are performing well.
Much of the mission’s success came down to very quick thinking by Intuitive Machines’ mission controllers — and just a stroke of very good luck.
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus during a press conference after the IM-1 landing. Image Credits: NASA
The navigational issues started after Odysseus conducted a planned maneuver called lunar orbital insertion on Wednesday night, which put it in an elliptical orbit around the moon. That ended up being extremely “fortuitous,” Altemus said, because it led mission controllers to try to use a navigational subsystem called “laser rangefinders” far earlier than planned (the lasers were going to be activated for the first time during the final descent phase).
After reviewing the data, the company realized the morning of landing that the lasers were not working — because they did not turn off a physical safety switch on the component while it was still on the ground.
These lasers determine critical variables for landing, like altitude and horizontal velocity; with them non-functional, Odysseus could’ve succumbed to the fate of so many other landers and crashed on the surface. The company considered a handful of options, but ultimately they decided to use a NASA doppler lidar payload that was meant as a technology demonstration. They directed Odysseus to orbit the moon for an additional two-hour period, to give them more time to load software patches and reset the lander’s guidance, navigation and control system.
It was a remarkable last-minute save. Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s space technology mission directorate, said during the press conference that the agency was hoping to get the doppler lidar technology to a technology readiness level (TRL) of 6, but that the successful execution onboard Odysseus has brought it to TRL 9, the highest level of readiness.
“All that hard work came to bear yesterday when there was a technical issue and the teams decided that hey, it was best to try to do the switch and rely on this tech demonstration,” he said. “Everything we understand from the telemetry received, which is limited to this point, until we get all the data back, is that the technology performed flawlessly.”
