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IT TURNS OUT THAT ODYSSEUS LANDED ON THE MOON WITHOUT ANY ALTIMETRY DATA

"Hours after we got off the launch pad, we almost lost the spacecraft."

Eric Berger – 27. Feb. 2024 22:33
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the
Moon. Credit: Intuitive Machines
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the
Moon. Credit: Intuitive Machines
216

HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into
Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the
Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen
operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit
onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small
camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.

"I just wanted you to see the team," he said.

The founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, which for a few days this
month has been the epicenter of the spaceflight universe after landing the first
commercial vehicle on the Moon, invited me to the company's nerve center in
Houston to set some things straight.

"You can say whatever you want to say," Altemus said. "But from my perspective,
this is an absolute success of a mission. Holy crap. The things that you go
through to fly to the Moon. The learning, just every step of the way,
is tremendous."

Altemus will participate in a news conference on Wednesday at Johnson Space
Center to provide a fuller perspective of the journey of Odysseus to the Moon
and all those learnings. But I got the sense he invited me to the company's
offices Tuesday because he was itching to tell someone—to tell the world—that
although Odysseus had toppled over after touching down, the mission was, in his
words, an absolute success.

After more than an hour of speaking with Altemus, I believe him.


ARS VIDEO


HOW THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL'S TEAM DESIGNED ITS TERRIFYING, IMMERSIVE AUDIO



Odysseus is a beastly machine, and the team flying it isn't shabby, either. They
have certainly busted their asses. The offices in south Houston were littered
with the remains of junk food, coffee, and other elixirs of long nights and
wracked brains. It's all been a whirlwind, no doubt. Next to a bag of tortilla
chips, there was a bottle of Ibuprofen.





COMING IN BLIND

As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range
finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to
attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to
the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the
laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its
software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation
Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes.

While this software patch mostly worked, Altemus said Tuesday that the flight
computer onboard Odysseus was unable to process data from the NASA payload in
real time. Therefore, the last accurate altitude reading the lander received
came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12
minutes from touchdown.

That left the spacecraft, which was flying autonomously, to rely on its optical
navigation cameras. By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight
computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface.
Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent
and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it
could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far.

"So we're coming down to our landing site with no altimeter," Altemus said.

Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about
100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of
touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral
movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed
of 2 meters per second.




"That little geometry made us hit a little harder than we wanted to," he said.

But all was not lost. Based upon data downloaded from the spacecraft and imagery
from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site,
Intuitive Machines has determined that the lander came down to the surface and
likely skidded. This force caused one of its six landing legs to snap. Then, for
a couple of seconds, the lander stood upright before toppling over due to the
failed leg.

The company has an incredible photo of this moment showing the lander upright,
with the snapped leg and the engine still firing. Altemus plans to publicly
release this photo Wednesday.




COMPLETING THE MISSION

Over the weekend, the company's scientists and engineers raced to understand the
condition of the lander. Yes, it was on its side. But one end appeared to be
elevated. They realized this was due to a 12 percent slope of the terrain at the
edge of a crater.

From a power standpoint, the engineering team received a blow, with the "top" of
the lander now lying on the ground. A large solar panel on top of the vehicle
was supposed to gather energy. It could still have helped had it been pointed
toward the part of the horizon where the Sun was. However, due to the lander's
orientation, this end was pointed away from the Sun.

That meant all of the power coming into Odysseus was doing so through a single
solar panel on its side, which was now facing upward. According to Altemus, this
panel is producing about 170 watts of power. That's more than enough to operate
the lander but not simultaneously use the powerful Quasonix transmitter that
sends broadband data back to satellite dishes on Earth. This requires 210 watts
of power.

The Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, has solar panels on its sides as well as at
the top of the vehicle.
Credit: Lee Hutchinson
The Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, has solar panels on its sides as well as at
the top of the vehicle. Credit: Lee Hutchinson






The choice Intuitive Machines faced was whether to keep operating Odysseus for
several more days on lower power as the Sun sank lower to the horizon or to use
the juice when it had good line-of-sight communications with large satellite
dishes back on Earth. That would mean losing most functions as soon
as Wednesday.

"The question is, do you want to limp along and stay alive with everything shut
off?" Altemus said. "Or do you want to go on the Quasonix, when you have the big
ear listening, and get all the data you can? And that's the decision we made, to
go get all the data. It's not how long you stay alive. It's how much information
you glean from this mission."

The engineers were able to answer another mystery as well. They were getting
communications from all four antennas on the lander, but two were sending back
largely gibberish. It turns out that the muffled signal they were getting from
those two antennas was bouncing off the surface of the Moon because the antennas
were pointing downward. Mission operators were able to modulate the signal to
get a clean stream of data.

As a result, the Intuitive Machines team expects to receive good data from five
of the six NASA payloads on board. Only the Stereo Cameras for the Lunar
Plume-Surface Studies experiment, intended to capture the effects of the
lander’s engine plume as it interacted with the lunar surface, are not
responding. Altemus said he believes this payload was damaged during the landing
process. Most of the commercial payloads are working as intended.




BUILDING A TEAM

In thinking back over the 12 days since the Intuitive Machines lander launched
on a Falcon 9 rocket, Altemus said the mission experienced 11 crises. The first
of these happened shortly after the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage released the
spacecraft into a translunar injection. The star trackers on board the
spacecraft failed.




"We had no way to navigate in space," Altemus said. "So we were gently rolling
and tumbling through space. The battery was not charging. We could not orient
the spacecraft. We were losing communication. Hours after we got off the launch
pad, we almost lost the spacecraft."

The mission operators were eventually able to regain communications with the
lander and, after diagnosing the problem, managed to change a parameter that
reset the star trackers. At the time, Odysseus was down to three hours of
battery lifetime. Altemus said crises like this, and the loss of the range
finders, happened over and over. "This mission kept throwing us alligators, and
we would reduce these alligators to snapping turtles because they don't hurt as
bad," he said.

If one assumes there is a 70 percent chance of recovering from any one of these
crises but you have to address 11 different crises on the way to the Moon, the
probability of mission success is less than 2 percent.

"The reason we made it is right here, our people," he said. "The team we had,
what they did, oh my God. They never quit. The perseverance, the resilience,
just the power of the people we have in this team. That's why we're on
the Moon."


A SUCCESS?

There are many ways to judge Odysseus. Some people heard the lander toppled over
and assumed it was a failure. Others look at China or India having success with
similarly sized landers on the Moon and see this as a failure of American
ingenuity. The United States can't even land a spacecraft on the Moon anymore?

But that's an ignorant take. In truth, NASA is thrilled with Intuitive Machines'
performance. The aerospace industry at large understands what this company was
up against and is celebrating its success. Most of the customers flying on
Odysseus are getting the data they paid for.




The reality is that Intuitive Machines is a private company with about 250
people working on this lunar lander program. That's a small fraction of the
resources that national space programs typically devote to these initiatives,
and with all the data it has gathered, Intuitive Machines and its customers can
be pretty confident that the company will stick the landing next time.

And there will be a next time, as the commercial lunar landers built by private
companies in the United States cost about $100 million instead of the
half-billion dollars the government would have spent on a specialized, one-time
mission to the Moon.

Here's why I think this is a truly notable success. Consider the trials and
turmoil that a similarly sized company called SpaceX went through 18 years ago
as it worked toward the first launch of its first rocket, the Falcon 1. Rockets
are hard, but so are spacecraft that must make a soft landing on the Moon. I
would argue that a lunar lander like Odysseus is as complicated, if not more so,
than a relatively simple booster like the Falcon 1.

That first Falcon 1 launch in 2006 failed. Its engine caught fire 30 seconds
after liftoff, and pieces of the booster tumbled into the Pacific Ocean near the
Kwajalein Atoll. A year later, the second launch failed due to a problem with
the booster's upper stage. Still, another year later, a third launch attempt
failed. Here we are nearly two decades later, and SpaceX is the most
accomplished rocket company in the world. It has built a highway to orbit.
Intuitive Machines is trying to extend the expressway to the Moon.

Unlike the initial Falcon 1, Odysseus flew all the way to the Moon on its very
first time out and made a soft landing. It has been phoning home ever since,
sending a rich stream of data. That's a pretty big win.

Intuitive Machines

Eric Berger Senior Space Editor
Eric Berger Senior Space Editor
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from
astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff,
about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket
and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.
216
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