Half a century after the Apollo 17 mission, a United States spacecraft will arrive on the Moon this Thursday. This is the module Odysseus, which was successfully launched last week by a Falcon 9 rocket from the SpaceX company. If the mission is completed successfully, it would be the first moon landing achieved by a private company, Intuitive Machines, owned by billionaire American businessman of Iranian origin Kamal Ghaffarian. NASA estimates that the arrival will occur at 00:24 on Friday, Spanish peninsular time (18:24 on the East coast of the United States and 17:24 in the central area of Mexico). Here you can follow the signal live.
The new attempt comes after a few eventful months for other competitors in the space race and after the recent fiasco of a Japanese and another American mission. Odysseus It carries six devices that NASA wants to place safely on the gray dust. The Intuitive Machines lander fired its engine on the back side of the Moon while out of contact with Earth on Wednesday. Flight controllers at the company's headquarters in Houston had to wait for the ship to emerge to know if the lander was in orbit or drifting aimlessly away, in one of the most delicate moments of the mission.
During Thursday, controllers have been lowering the orbit of the device from about 60 miles (92 kilometers) to 6 miles (10 kilometers), in a crucial maneuver on the opposite side of the Earth's natural satellite. They have then targeted the descent near the south pole of the Moon.
Odysseus It tracks its position using cameras, comparing crater patterns with stored maps and measuring its altitude with laser beams on the surface. About 1.2 kilometers from the landing site, the spacecraft will pivot in a vertical position and the sensors will look for a safe place to land. During the last 15 meters of the descent, you will stop using the camera and altitude measurement laser to avoid being fooled by dust raised by the engine exhaust.
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