Soft-landing a craft on the moon is difficult. There’s no nation or private firm that will dispute it. Everyone who has tried has learnt lessons the hard way. Ample testimony to this fact is how America, the pioneers of multiple Apollo-series manned moon landings are celebrating the latest partial success by private firm Intuitive Machines.. Made by Texas-based Intuitive Machines, Lunar lander Odysseus managed to soft-land near the Lunar South Pole on Friday (Feb 23).
America’s last manned moon mission was the Apollo 17 in 1972 and since then, America hasn’t landed on the moon – be it man or robot… In recent years, the US has been working towards setting up the long-term presence of humans on the moon.
As part of this, NASA has been funding American private firms, in what is known as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme. NASA pays companies to ferry different kinds of experiments to the moon, the private firm would be tasked with building, launching and operating the spacecraft.
Earlier this year, a similar private Mission Peregrine one by American Firm Astrobotic ended up in failure, while travelling from the earth to the moon. That’s where Intuitive Machines has succeeded. Their craft has soft-landed on the moon and is operational. Literally – there’s an American moon landing, more than 50 years after Apollo 17. However, there’s a catch.
The robotic craft Odysseus appears to have landed tilted. Perhaps, it broke a leg while landing. It does qualify as a soft landing, but the craft’s operational capabilities could be impacted in some way or the other.
Recently, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA also soft-landed its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon(SLIM) craft. With that, Japan became the 5th nation to land a craft on the moon, but even SLIM had a tilted landing. It hampered some of the operations of the craft. However, Japan managed to get images of their craft on the moon using their toy-based robotic rovers. So Far, the American firm hasn’t shared images of their Odysseus landed on the moon.
Moon landings are never easy. A host of private firms and Government agencies failed in recent years. Here are the notable ones:
- In April 2019, Beresheet, a private mission from Israel had hard-landed on the moon and was destroyed on impact.
- In September 2019, the Indian space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 had a hard landing and was destroyed on impact.
- In March 2023, Hakuto-R, a private moon landing mission from Japan crash-landed on the moon.
- In August 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 lander crash-landed on the moon, owing to a failed manoeuvre. It was a mission by the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
However, the biggest success in recent years has been India’s Chandrayaan-3 which soft-landed flawlessly on August 23, 2023. This was of course a mission by the Indian government space agency ISRO. Indian space agency officials described it as a “feather-like soft-landing”.
This was India’s second attempt at lunar landing and it delivered on all planned objectives and much more. The success of Chandrayaan-3 demonstrated the determination of ISRO teams, who worked for 4yrs to perfect the flawless mission by performing thousands of simulations and ground tests.
Chandrayaan-3 highlights
The Vikram lander touched down perfectly near the Lunar south pole, as planned. The first craft to soft touch down near the lunar south pole
ISRO shared multiple images of the lander and rover on the Lunar surface. The lander ramp was deployed and rover Pragyan traversed the moon. All scientific equipment performed their roles and sent the data back to Earth.
Watch: Odysseus moon landing: Historic mission reaches lunar surface
Before the planned end of the mission, ISRO performed a hop test with its lander and tested a crucial technology where a craft can fire its engines to vertically take off from the moon’s surface.
From the moon’s orbit, the Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module was steered back towards Earth. This is essential to return from the moon and bring back samples to earth.
Learning lessons from one failed landing, ISRO delivered a textbook success mission with Chandrayaan-3 and made 1.4 billion Indians proud and amazed the world. ISRO is now working on Chandrayaan-4. ISRO is also working with the Japanese space agency JAXA – a mission known as LUPEX (Lunar Polar Exploration). LUPEX will be launched on a Japanese rocket. It will comprise an Indian moon lander and a Japanese robotic rover.
