Fingers crossed, but the Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar mission is continuing to look pretty good:
Lunar landers haven’t had great luck lately, but so far this one has been pretty smooth sailing. It’s also one of the more advanced landers, having a cryogenic methane-oxygen engine. Which is tricky since it had to be fueled on the launch pad.
Interestingly, the lander evolved out of the previous Project Morpheus vertical takeoff and landing system, which itself arose from the work that Armadillo Aerospace did. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack (of Doom/Quake fame), so it’s nice to see that finally bear fruit.
I hope it sheds some light on the mysteries of lunar water. There have been huge developments in the discovery of water on the moon. At first it was thought that any water on the moon would be locked in the permanently shadowed craters at rhe poles. But now it appears that water is all through the regolith at higher latitudes, and not as much in the craters as we thought.
Hopefully this lander will help figure out the story, but water on the moon just ight be plentiful, easily harvested, and renewable. Huge implications for colonization.
I’ll be satisfied it it lands upright and in one piece .
But yeah, there’s an enormous amount to learn about lunar water. My current feeling is that the sweet spot for lunar ISRU is oxygen: carry the fuel from Earth, but make the oxygen there. But if there’s water all throughout the regolith, then you can make your hydrogen there, too. You’ll still have to bring some carbon if you want methane.
Thr Sophia telescope found that the regolith in Clavius crater has about 12 ounces of water per cubic meter (roughly 100-400 ppm). This is regolith in direct sunlight. Apparently, the water is possibly created from the interaction of the solar wind and oxygen in the regolith, and collects inside volcanic hydroscopic glass beads that are part of the regolith.
A study of those beads showed that they lose their water in about 15 years, meaning that they are being constantly replenished. So we may have a 15 year water cycle on the moon that can provide endless amounts of water.
Of particular interest will be if the lander finds water at the regolith at the poles. It should be minimal, since the solar wind is much weaker per square meter at rhe poles.
It may be that at the poles most water is in the shadowed craters. But from maybe 60-80 degrees latitude the regolith may contain the water.
Well, it’s on the ground. There’s a comms outage… unclear whether the lander made a crater or if it’s just a comms glitch. It seems that an outage was expected, but it’s been a few minutes now.
I thought there was supposed to be a camera following behind the lander to give us some cool live TeeVee. Do I have that right? Is there no images from camera because of comm issues? Or was there never going to be a camera view of the lander at all?
There was a little cubesat that was supposed to shoot off to the side and take pictures of the descent at the last moments. But it wasn’t going to be live–there would be some selection process and only a handful of pics would be transmitted back. Unfortunately, at this size/power/cost scale there isn’t enough margin for live video. Still, there’s hope for a few cool pics.
They are getting faint signals from the lander–it’s not totally dead. This reads to me that it tipped over (maybe a hard landing, maybe some lateral velocity, etc.). So, antennas not pointed in the right direction, maybe even bent/snapped, but not such a hard landing to destroy it.
That’s total speculation on my part of course, but we’ll find out more in the coming hours.
Huh, that’s the end of the livestream. I guess that means X for further updates.
The lifestream was super hit or miss. Bad was a total lack of telemetry and the low-information host. Good was the overall description of the mission and that they piped through the main voice channels. The host was making some mundane comment while someone in the control room pipes up “We’re not dead yet!”
During the coverage of the landing, a company spokesman said a laser instrument on the spacecraft that was to provide data on its altitude and velocity was not working.
Maybe that explains the lack of telemetry data during the webcast?
Maybe, but they should have had other information. I’d hope. They actually had another rangefinder via a NASA instrument, but I guess it’s possible they weren’t able to pipe through the real-time data.
Well, this one is also alive, so it seems they’re somewhat comparable. We’ll see what science they can still get out of it.
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