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.Īlso flying on Odysseus was EagleCam, a camera system built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. One of them comes from Columbia Sportswear, which wanted to test its "Omni-Heat Infinity" insulative material in deep space. Intuitive Machines also put six commercial payloads on Odysseus for IM-1. Yet another will demonstrate autonomous positioning tech, which could eventually become part of a broad, GPS-like navigation system on and around the moon. NDL turned out to be vital to today's touchdown, as you'll see below.Īnother instrument was designed to study how the spacecraft's engine exhaust interacts with lunar dirt and rock. 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. The NASA instruments, which cost the agency an additional $11 million to develop, are designed to conduct a variety of investigations. That mission features a Nova-C vehicle named Odysseus, after the famous voyaging hero in Greek mythology. It covered the transport of six agency experiments and technology demonstrations on Intuitive Machines' first lunar mission, which the company calls IM-1. In 2019, CLPS selected Intuitive Machines to deliver a batch of NASA science instruments to the lunar surface using the company's Nova-C lander, which is about the size of a British telephone booth.Īfter some modifications, the task order turned out to be worth $118 million, NASA officials said recently. Related: The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission "One of our main goals is to make sure that we develop a lunar economy."Īnd that's where Intuitive Machines comes in. "The goal here is for us to investigate the moon in preparation for Artemis, and really to do business differently for NASA," Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during a press conference on Feb. So NASA established another program called CLPS ("Commercial Lunar Payload Services"), which books rides for agency science instruments on robotic moon landers built by American companies. Before sending astronauts there, however, the agency wants to collect more data about this little-explored area - to help determine, for example, just how much water it contains and how easy this crucial resource is to access. NASA plans to set up one or more Artemis bases in the moon's southern polar region, which is thought to harbor lots of water ice. This directive gave rise to a broad and ambitious program called Artemis, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s - and to use the knowledge gained in doing so to help get astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. In December 2017, then-President Donald Trump ordered NASA to return astronauts to the moon in the relatively near future.
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But, some frustrating fits and starts notwithstanding, getting back to the surface was not a priority - until recently.
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launched a number of robotic moon probes after the Apollo era NASA's sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the moon since 2009, for example. With the moon race thus definitively won, NASA was directed to focus on other goals for its human spaceflight program - chiefly, the development and operation of the space shuttle program. famously put 12 astronauts on the lunar surface over the course of six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972.
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This push didn't come from mere scientific curiosity: Landing astronauts on Earth's nearest neighbor was viewed as a national security imperative, a way to demonstrate technological superiority over the nation's Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. The moon was a frequent target for American spacecraft during the 1960s and early 1970s. (Image credit: Intuitive Machines) Returning to the moon 21, 2024, a day before its successful touchdown. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus moon lander captured this photo from lunar orbit on Feb.