Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander last week became the first American lander to touch down on the Moon in 50 years – albeit landing on its side. Initially the Texas-based private firm said Odysseus was "upright and starting to send data" but later corrected this assessment during a press conference. CEO Stephen Altemus used …
True, but I don't remember any that landed on their side... obviously getting a human in the control loop has certain advantages!
Nonetheless, kudos and one of these for the team --->
Of course, 'pictures or it didn't happen' is all a bit passé now. But I'm still looking forward to seeing them.
The Apollo landers (and Surveyor before that) had a comparatively much larger footprint and much lower center of mass. Which made them far less sensitive to tipping over. Both SLIM and Odysseus (Intuitive machines) used a very different landing style and design. SLIM had the novel approach of tipping over on purpose and intended to end up on it's side. It lost an engine nozzle on approach and still managed to get to the surface more or less intact, it just didn't have enough control with the missing engine and ended up over rotated and on it's side. Odysseus was quite tall with a pretty high CoM . To avoid complexity it's landing legs were not folding, but the largest they could fit inside the payload fairing of the launch vehicle. That meant it was more sensitive to lateral drift and likely it just caught a rock at the worst possible moment (just before touchdown) and ended up face-planting a rock.
I would, at least for the IM missions.The fuel and oxidizer mix they use doesn't have the same density and volumetric flow rates (they're using liquid hydrogen and oxygen) which means they need either 4 tanks to distribute the weight evenly (with 2 oxygen tanks and 2 hydrogen tanks opposite each other) or they need 2 tanks to be stacked on top of each other (automatically leading to a relatively tall design). The only way to increase the footprint would be to go to folding legs, which is a lot of extra complexity for not a whole lot of reward if all other things work as intended. It would also have helped a lot if they hadn't left the safe-ing pins for the laser range finders in. That's the "WTF?" takeaway for this mission.
The Apollo landers used 4 tanks, 2 for fuel and 2 for oxidiser as you described, and they were short&wide (the bit that was left behind on the surface anyway). So we know that configuration works.
Yes the laser range finder stuff-up was astoundingly bad.
And the Chinese even did it on the far (dark?) side: China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon.
"We believe this is the orientation of the lander on the Moon..."
I wonder why it's so difficult to actually know the exact orientation of the lander? Didn't they put accelerometers in to measure the exact orientation? Or ist that not possible due to the reduced gravity?
It sounds like they are guesstimating the orientation from the light received by the different solar panels...?
I see this mission as a failure. Tipping over makes the lander more or less useless and reduces the transmission rate to a crawl due to the antenna's not being aligned properly.
Also, the horizontal speed component, although minor (about walking speed) shouldn't have been there. This means sub-par engineering since even the first Surveyor lunar lander (launched almost 55 years ago) got this part right. In fact, the Surveyors were so primitive that all the computing power for it was actually based in Houston and the lander itself was remotely controlled, despite the 1 or 2 second delay.
Absolutely agree! There is no way this can be considered a success. Landing a top-heavy vehicle with a positive-horizontal motion is just amateurish. Plus, an employee left the cover on the lidar which should have been removed before launch - really!? This company has a lot to learn.
"There is no way this can be considered a success."
Disagree. It got to the moon and landed[0] in one piece. The communications link is up and running. Science can be done. Many things will be learned. It is without a doubt a win in my book. The only abject failure is the bit of payload attached to the side that it landed on, and that's just a vanity piece so who cares.
[0] Anything you can walk away from is a landing.
"During the mission, the Intuitive Machines team said they were concerned that the lander could get lost when they detected a faulty piece of navigation equipment." - no, they realised (by chance) that someone had forgotten to remove the safety lock from the LIDAR system. They did an epic job of patching in signals from another sensor but somebody forgot the checklist.
One upside down, one on it's side. In the future we will make all our landers ball shaped, and every landing will be a success. The Alien Overloads hiding on the moon will need to find another way to molest our landers.
Or maybe someone could walk on the sound stage on the back lot and stand it back up?
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