Around a month after the first successful commercial moon landing, the operators of “Odysseus” have finally given up hope of a second chance for the lander. The lander’s power system will not enable any further data connection to Earth, “Odysseus” has “faded forever,” said the space company Intuitive Machines on the online platform X, formerly Twitter.
After landing in February, the solar batteries of the “Nova-C” lander, nicknamed “Odysseus” or “Odie”, enabled data transmission to Earth for around a week, as hoped, before they ran out of power as expected. because the sun no longer reached the lander’s location.
Although it was not part of the original plan for the mission, Intuitive Machines and the US space agency NASA had hoped to be able to contact the lander again when the sun’s rays reached it again. But that didn’t work.
With “Odysseus,” a US device landed on the moon in February for the first time in more than 50 years. When touching down, “Odysseus” tipped slightly and became tilted. However, data could still be collected.
The mission is part of NASA’s “CLPS” (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. With this program, the US space agency wants to collect as much knowledge as possible on its own way back to the moon comparatively cheaply and efficiently by awarding contracts for lunar landings to private companies and working with them.
