America Lands on the Moon for the First Time Since 1972
This is so cool.
The Odysseus landed near the moon’s lunar south pole on Thursday night.
It’s the first time the U.S. has been on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972!
Intuitive Mechanics, a private company based in Houston, built the robotic lander.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Odysseus on February 15. It entered the lunar orbit on February 21. It didn’t all go smoothly, though:
In the home stretch of its touchdown try today, however, the lander’s handlers discovered that Odysseus’ laser rangefinders, which allow it to determine its altitude and horizontal velocity, weren’t working properly. So the team pressed NASA’s experimental NDL payload into service for this vital function, pushing the landing try back by two hours to put the new plan into action.
This last-minute workaround — which required the team to design a software patch on the ground and beam it up to Odysseus — did the trick. At 6:11 p.m. EST (2311 GMT) today, Odysseus fired up its main engine for a crucial 11-minute burn that slowed the craft’s descent toward the lunar surface. Then, at 6:23 p.m. EST (2353 GMT), Odysseus touched down softly near the rim of the crater Malapert A, about 190 miles (300 kilometers) from the lunar south pole.
Odysseus will stay on the surface for seven Earth days. The moon takes 27 Earth days to rotate on its axis. A lunar night lasts about two weeks
The mission ends “when the sun goes down at Malapert A, as Odysseus was not designed to survive the bitter cold of the long lunar night.”
Odysseus carried a bunch of NASA instruments to the moon:
The NASA instruments, which cost the agency an additional $11 million to develop, are designed to conduct a variety of investigations. For instance, one of them, called NDL (“Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing”) used LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to collect data during descent and landing. NDL turned out to be vital to today’s touchdown, as you’ll see below.
Another instrument was designed to study how the spacecraft’s engine exhaust interacts with lunar dirt and rock. Yet another will demonstrate autonomous positioning tech, which could eventually become part of a broad, GPS-like navigation system on and around the moon.
It also has:
Intuitive Machines also put six commercial payloads on Odysseus for IM-1. One of them comes from Columbia Sportswear, which wanted to test its “Omni-Heat Infinity” insulative material in deep space. Another is a set of sculptures by the artist Jeff Koons, and there’s even a “secure lunar repository” that aims to help preserve humanity’s storehouse of accumulated knowledge.
Also flying on Odysseus was EagleCam, a camera system built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. EagleCam was designed to deploy from Odysseus about 100 feet (30 meters) above the lunar surface and snap photos of the lander’s epic touchdown from below. You can learn more about all 12 of the IM-1 payloads here.
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Comments
Elon Musk landed on the moon while he happens to be an American, you mean.
America as a whole, and certainly the American government, had very little to do with it.
The left-wing, transgender, non-binary, feminist, pansexual, graduates of Woke University are the primary group that NASA seeks. Therefore, NASA employees are qualified to extol the virtues of Muslim math, but don’t have the depth to figure out aeronautical engineering.
Musk isn’t (yet) required to hire employees that government agencies are required to hire.
No, Musk merely launched it. The mission was designed, paid for, and run by NASA.
The landing was faked by Quentin Tarantino.
Didn’t you see those alien structures in the background?
Sadly, I truly believe it is well within the capacity of CGI to completely fake a mission like this.
They’ll have to put up a large enough shiny reflector on the moon to be visible to the naked eye before all doubt is removed. Nowadays, I’m not even sure if we have enough high powered pure-optical telescopes to see any human bits on the moon.
What’s the point? We stopped spending money to go there for a reason. There’s very little to learn there
Science wasn’t the rest we went there or that we stopped going there. Politics is.
One point would be that this was a success largely attributable to private companies, rather than NASA, and while NASA’s own device proved helpful in the end, this was a major accomplishment for private enterprise.
The Moon was ours. It was a matter of us protecting and developing American territory. Just to be in sync with all of human history before and with basic human nature.
The moon is a great platform for many things, manufacturing, research and high ground for dropping rocks 🙂
By International Treaty the Moon belongs to no one.
The Outer Space Treaty was nothing but pure retardation that we are not bound by. Who is going to enforce it? It was a dead letter from the very start. Acquisition of territory is done and maintained by force of arms. Period. The Outer SPace Treaty could have been simply torn up at any point.
Further, the only nation that was capable of even getting close to the Moon was us, so no one else had anything to say about it.
The fact is that the Moon was US territory but we declined to defend our territory because we were retards.
No argument on that. First in claims it.
Treaties are respected by signatory leaders and nations until the day they aren’t.
The ephemeral nature of treaties.
The essence of impermanence in human relationships and agreements
Quite frankly, the same goes for the Constitution. It is only as good as the parchment it is written on, and the willingness of all parties to adhere to it.
Unfortunately, one side is working hard to no longer be bound by it, while the other side is wedded to it.
Yay, I guess.
I liked watching people on the moon 50 years ago in grainy B&W tv images better, but ok. Go technology.
wonder what sort of effect moving five trillion tons of mass from Moon to Earth…we would probably move out of orbit and get blasted by an asteroid belt for 62,000 years before sailing off into eternal darkness.
We should definitely put a moon base up there before this happens…and then make a tv series about it 🤔😁
great
just another place for the lefty to create more regs and green (cheese?) regs
Sounds like they want to test the durability of earth’s human trace fossils (inanimate artifacts that provide evidence of a species behavior and existence) for after we obliterate ourselves and our planet dies.
An unmanned lander is not even in the same ballpark as a man stepping onto the lunar surface. It is embarrassing to even have these two wildly different events compared. We are still far, far, far behind where we were over 50 years ago, when we were using computers with 2K RAM and clock speeds slower than you could tap your foot.
The Moon was ours and we should have stayed there and protected our claim. The space station and shuttle were complete wastes of money, time, and expertise. We reduced space “exploration” to hobby vacations in orbit. It was pathetic.
The space program stalling was the single biggest disappointment of my life.
Indeed. Had it continued, instead of busing illegals from TX to NY City, Chicago and Denver, we could be “busing” them to the moon. /s
To the moon, Alice!
But then, Venezuela would claim ownership… but still expect the US to pick up the tab and fee and house their people. No difference as far as I am concerned.
😉
The country is broke. Rocket ships to the moon are not in the cards when there is a deficit of 35 trillion, and climbing due to many other projects, programs, grants, and other goodies with no Constitutional basis.
But who cares if space exploration has regressed in 50 years?
We’ve made progress elsewhere.
I mean, look at all the genders we’ve discovered since then.
Correct! We used to have nine planets in our solar system, but now only eight.
But we have 57 genders, all discovered without the use of science or trillions of dollars!
That is HUGE progress!
Somewhere in my faulty memory banks I recall Musk talking about creating an off-world repository of human knowledge, not in case of an extinction level event, but to safeguard knowledge against leftist-globalist historical-revisionist tyranny.
Those two pictures display the facial expressions of smug, defiant people. Just like mug shots of a certain demographic often display.
And, ^^^ this comment ^^^ belongs in another thread. Sorry.
China lands on the moon: We claim this for …:
America pops up out of a crater: ” Surprise Losers”!
I hope Odysseus is wearing its Life Alert … “Help! I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up!”
That sounds painful.
They will rename the lander “Guam”.