© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21, 2024, in this handout image released February 22, 2024. Intuitive Machines/Handout via REUTERS/ File photo
By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
(Reuters) -Odysseus, the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century, is expected to lose contact with ground control on Wednesday evening, six days after an off-kilter touchdown that hindered its communications and solar charging capability.
Word of the robot lander’s projected mission conclusion came during a news briefing by Texas-based Intuitive Machines, the company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly the spacecraft to the moon carrying science instruments for the U.S. space agency and several commercial customers.
Intuitive Machines Chief Executive Officer Stephen Altemus said engineers at the company’s flight operations center in Houston expect Odysseus to reach the “conclusion of this mission as planned,” despite a number of difficulties that have dogged the endeavor.
“We have conducted a very successful mission at this point,” Altemus said, adding that the flow of data retrieved from the spacecraft has increased substantially since “sporadic” communications that marked the start of the mission.
He said engineers planned to put Odysseus “to sleep” on Wednesday evening, as the lander enters its sixth day on the lunar surface, once solar power re-generation is no longer sufficient to keep the spacecraft running.
But he said flight controllers would seek to re-start Odysseus again in three weeks, once the sun rises again over the vehicle’s landing site in the region of the moon’s south pole.
