Odysseus spacecraft successfully lands on the moon – live updates | Space

“We are on the surface,” said Tim Crain, the chief technology officer who is leading mission control. “Odysseus has a new home.”

The mission director just called out three minutes till touchdown.

There will likely be a slight delay between when the lander makes contact with the surface, and when we will get confirmation. That delay could be as little as 15 seconds or several minutes.

Odysseus has started its “powered descent initiative”, as it readies for a landing. The engine on the lander has started up, and it is slowing itself down. As it lowers, sensors on the it will look for a safe spot for a landing,

What’s on board?

Martin Belam

As an example of the mixed payloads that private space missions are taking, Nasa administrator, Bill Nelson said of today’s mission “Nasa scientific instruments are on their way to the moon, a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century.”

He added “These daring moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation.”

But it isn’t just science on board. There are also 125 of his miniature moon sculptures by the artis Jeff Koons. And as this social media post from Intuitive Machines shows, the lander is also carrying “an eternal tribute to His Holiness Pramukh Swami Maharaj”.

Martin Belam

Why isn’t the landing a foregone conclusion? Well, “space is hard” as Nasa has tended to say. The recent track record of moon landing attempts is chequered to say the least.

India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission made a historic landing on the south pole of the moon in August 2023, after a 40-day journey, and the rover had spent over a week collecting data from the lunar surface, but was powered down after a few days.

Japan became only the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India, when it deployed its Slim moon lander in January 2024. After an initial scare when it was thought the probe had landed in such a way that its solar panels wouldn’t get enough light to power it, it began scientific operations.

The most recent US attempt to reach the moon ended in failure in January, when the spacecraft malfunctioned on the way to the moon and plunged back to Earth. That is gravity for you. A fuel leak onboard the Peregrine lander ended hopes it would reach the moon, despite a successful launch by the Vulcan Centaur rocket.

The Israeli Beresheet probe was meant to be the first private lander to touch down on the moon back in 2019, but it only succeeded in hitting the moon at sufficient speed that it may have spilled tardigrades on to the surface.

Ian Sample

Why does it seem to be harder to successfully land on the moon these days than it used to be? Our science editor Ian Sample explains:

One fundamental challenge, says Jan Wörner, a former director general of the European Space Agency (Esa), is weight. “You are always close to failure because you have to be light or the spacecraft will not fly. You cannot have a big safety margin.”

Added to that, almost every spacecraft is a prototype. Apart from rare cases, such as the Galileo communications satellites, spacecraft are bespoke machines. They are not mass produced with the same tried and tested systems and designs. And once they are deployed in space, they are on their own. “If you have trouble with your car, you can have it repaired, but in space there’s no opportunity,” says Wörner. “Space is a different dimension.”

The moon itself presents its own problems. There is gravity – one-sixth as strong as on Earth – but no atmosphere. Unlike Mars, where spacecraft can fly to their destination and brake with parachutes, moon landings depend entirely on engines. If you have a single engine, as smaller probes tend to, it must be steerable, because there is no other way to control the descent.

To complicate matters, the engine must have a throttle, allowing the thrust to be dialled up and down. “Usually you ignite them and they provide a steady state thrust,” says Nico Dettmann, Esa’s lunar exploration group leader. “To change the thrust during operations adds a lot more complexity.”

Rather than using its own laser instrument as planned to guide its decent to the Moon’s surface, the Odysseus will instead use a Lidar instrument provided by Nasa.

The lander’s extra orbit around the moon, which delayed its descent today, allowed for controllers up update software to allow for the use of the Nasa instrument.

Ian Sample

For years space exploration have been a state enterprise, but a new program from Nasa has opened the doors to private enterprise. Today’s landing attempt is one of a fleet of private spacecraft bound for the moon in the next few years. Under Nasa’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative, the agency is funding firms to build spacecraft and deliver cargo – along with payloads from other paying organisations – to various sites on the lunar surface.

The arrangement is a way to ferry equipment to the moon before astronauts return there later this decade. But this new era of moon missions has some scientists rattled. Future landers aim to drill for ice and other materials, potentially iron and rare earths, which are of interest to mining firms, but might do damage to sites of scientific interest, or interfere with scientific experiements on the moon that rely on its isolation and contamination free environment.

The problem is that no one is coordinating plans. And as more landers touch down, and more companies invest, it will become harder to thrash out a fair and trusted process whereby all countries and all sectors can pursue their aims without messing things up for others.

The uncrewed Nova-C lander built by Intuitive Machines launched on 15 February. Its scheduled touchdown near the moon’s south pole would be the first lunar landing of a US spacecraft since Nasa’s final Apollo mission in December 1972, and the first by a non-government entity.

“There have been a lot of sleepless nights getting ready for this,” Steve Altemus, the co-founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in an interview before the mission. Altemus was formerly Nasa’s director of engineering and deputy director of the Johnson Space Center before founding his company of about 90 employees in 2013.

The lander is a 14ft (4.3 meter) hexagon-shaped craft with six legs, and is aimed towards a landing at crater Malapert A close to the lunar south pole. Odysseus is carrying a payload of six Nasa science instruments and technology demonstrations as part of the agency’s commercial lunar payload services initiative

The Odysseus is expected to land at 6.24pm ET/11.24pm GMT.

Intuitive Machines had initially said it would land at 5.49pm ET, then 5.30pm, and this morning said it could land even earlier at 4.24pm. But ultimately flight controllers decided to circle the Odysseus around the moon one more time before landing, delaying the event by two hours.

Welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the latest attempt to successfully soft-land the very first private lander on our closest neighbor – the moon!

Last week SpaceX’s Falcon rocket blasted off in the middle of the US night from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center, dispatching Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander on its 230,000 miles (370,000km) journey.

Today the Odysseus lander is attempting to make the perilous descent. Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ aims to put its 14ft-tall, six-legged lander down just 186 miles (300km) shy of the moon’s south pole

Only five countries – the US, Russia, China, India and Japan – have scored a lunar landing and no private business has yet done so. The US has not returned to the moon’s surface since the Apollo program ended more than five decades ago.

Stay tuned for what could be a nerve-racking ride …