Another month, another attempt at the moon.
A robotic lunar lander is scheduled to launch in the early morning hours of Wednesday. If all goes well, it will become the first American spacecraft to land softly on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.
It is also the last private attempt to send a spacecraft to the Moon. Previous attempts have all ended in failure. But the company behind the latest effort, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is optimistic.
“I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to land softly on the moon,” said Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines. “We did the tests. We tested, tested and tested. All the tests we could do.
When will the launch happen and how can I watch it?
The Intuitive Machines lander, called Odysseus, is scheduled to launch at 12:57 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The weather is expected to be close to ideal, with only a 5% chance of launch-preventing conditions.
SpaceX AND NASA will stream launch coverage starting at 12.15am
If a technical problem or bad weather delays the launch, backup launch opportunities are Thursday and Friday.
When and where is the disembarkation?
If the launch occurs this week, the landing will occur on February 22 near a crater called Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite crater of the larger Malapert crater, named after Charles Malapert, a 17th-century Belgian astronomer.) .
Ulysses will enter orbit around the Moon approximately 24 hours before the landing attempt.
The landing site, about 185 miles from the south pole on the Moon’s near side, is relatively flat, an easier place to land a spacecraft. No American spacecraft has ever landed at the lunar south pole, which is a focus of many space agencies and companies because it may be rich in water ice.
How big is the spacecraft?
Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft project Nova-C and calls this particular lander Odysseus. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, about 14 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines points out that the lander’s body is about the size of an old British telephone booth, i.e. like the Tardis in the science fiction TV show “Doctor Who.”
At launch, with a full tank of propellant, the lander weighs about 4,200 pounds.
What will go to the moon?
NASA is the primary customer for the Intuitive Machines flight; is paying the company $118 million to deliver its payloads. NASA also spent an additional $11 million to develop and build the six flight instruments:
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An array of laser retroreflectors to reflect laser beams fired from Earth.
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A LIDAR instrument to precisely measure the altitude and speed of the spacecraft as it descends onto the lunar surface.
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A stereo camera to record the plume of dust kicked up by the lander’s engines during landing.
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A low-frequency radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles near the lunar surface on radio signals.
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A lighthouse, Lunar Node-1, to demonstrate an autonomous navigation system.
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An instrument in the propellant tank that uses radio waves to measure how much fuel is left in the tank.
The lander also carries a few other payloads, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida; a precursor instrument for a future lunar telescope; and an art project by Jeff Koons.
Wasn’t there just another American spacecraft headed to the Moon?
On January 8, Astrobotic Technology sent its Peregrine lander towards the moon. But a propulsion system malfunction shortly after launch prevented any possibility of landing. Ten days later, as Peregrine headed back toward Earth, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program. The goal of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the Moon rather than NASA building and operating its own lunar landers.
“We’ve always viewed these initial CLPS deliveries as something of a learning experience,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference Tuesday.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to send more missions more frequently as it prepares to send astronauts back to the Moon as part of its Artemis program.