Miami, Feb 22 (EFE).- An American spacecraft landed on the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years on Thursday, also becoming the first ever by a private company to do so. <\/p>
The last time a spacecraft from the United States landed on the moon was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.<\/p>
After a journey of more than 1 million kilometers, Intuitive Machines\u2019 uncrewed Odysseus lander made a successful \u201csoft landing\u201d around 5.23 pm Thursday, US Central Time (23:24 GMT) at Malapert A crater, just 300 kilometers away from the moon’s South Pole.<\/p>
\u201cWelcome to the moon,\u201d company co-founder Steve Altemus finally confirmed after some minutes during which the spacecraft was incommunicado.<\/p>
“Today for the first time in more than a half-century, the US has returned to the moon,\u201d said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson shortly after Odysseus’ landing was confirmed.<\/p>
The landing process was not without setbacks. As reported during the broadcast, the Intuitive Machines tool that was going to be used for guidance during the descent did not work and the company was forced to use a NASA instrument. <\/p>
Over the course of about an hour, Odysseus needed to turn on his main engine for about 10 minutes, using liquid oxygen and methane propellants, and rotate in order to get upright to land on six legs.<\/p>
The spacecraft, 4.3 meters high and weighing 675 kilos, lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at dawn on Feb. 15 from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, for a trip of almost seven days.<\/p>
On Wednesday, Odysseus successfully entered lunar orbit and remained at an altitude of about 90 kilometers until Thursday’s descent, but not before capturing an image of the Bel’kovich K crater, on the moon’s northern equatorial highlands, Intuitive Machines said.<\/p>
Odysseus will remain at Malapert A, where daytime temperatures of more than 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit) are recorded, for approximately a week until the lunar night falls, plunging the spacecraft into the freezing cold and likely rendering it inoperable.<\/p>
The mission, called IM-1, is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which is also part of the Artemis program with which the US space agency plans to return to send crewed trips to the Moon. <\/p>
Odysseus carries 12 payloads, including NASA\u2019s scientific and technological instruments, and commissions from private clients, including the outerwear company Columbia, which will test insulating material, and artist Jeff Koons, whose 125 miniature sculptures of the lunar phases make it the first \u201cauthorized\u201d art on the moon.<\/p>
The area where the module landed is one of the 13 candidate regions for the lunar landing of NASA’s Artemis III manned mission, scheduled for September 2026.<\/p>
The space agency believes that in this unexplored region there could be deposits of frozen water.<\/p>
The Intuitive Machines mission seeks to consolidate a path to bring NASA scientific instruments to the moon, as well as commercial cargo, and in this way pave the way for a sustainable human presence on the natural satellite. EFE <\/p>
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