The historic US Moon landing on Friday morning brought scenes similar to a Hollywood thriller, when the Odysseus spacecraft’s navigation systems stopped working about two hours before the expected touchdown.
From an article in The National by Sarwat Nasir.
The unmanned robotic lander’s rangefinders, the navigation lasers and camera, are crucial in the landing process because they allow it to detect exactly where it is by taking images of the lunar surface and avoiding hazards such as boulders.
But after they failed, Intuitive Machines, the team that built the lander, decided to switch to Nasa technology to save the mission.
“Today, flight controllers chose to exercise an additional orbit, before starting the IM-1 mission landing sequence,” an announcer said in a live-stream.
“This decision brought us to now, projecting a landing time of 17.24 CT [3.24am UAE time]. Intuitive Machines made the decision to reassign the primary navigation sensors from Odysseus’s laser range finding system to use the sensors on Nasa’s Navigation Doppler LIDAR.”
Nasa paid about $118 million to Houston-based company Intuitive Machines to carry six of its payloads to the lunar surface.
Although the US space agency’s navigation system was on board, it was not intended for use on the privately owned spacecraft.
Nasa’s engineers were only supposed to use the LIDAR system as an experimental technology for future Moon missions – but it ended up playing a crucial role in saving Friday’s entire mission.
But the IM-1 mission’s flight controllers used two lasers from Nasa’s LIDAR payload as an alternative means to navigate during the 11-minute powered descent to the lunar surface.
More drama unfolded after the landing, when mission control was only able to secure a weak signal from the vehicle, making it unclear what condition Odysseus was in.
For the complete article on the moon landing CLICK HERE.
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