After a week of sideways landing, US moon lander Odysseus is “still kicking.”

The first American spacecraft to land on the moon in fifty years, Odysseus, was “still kicking” on Thursday but getting close to shutting down as researchers awaited the last signals from its multimillion-dollar data collection mission.

The spacecraft’s operators had hoped that it could operate for as long as ten days when it landed on the moon a week ago. However, a clumsy sideways landing damaged its solar chargers and interfered with communications.

NASA paid Texas-based Intuitive Machines $118 million to build the robot lander and launch it to the lunar surface, so they will have the last say on its destiny. Odysseus was still functioning, according to Intuitive, at 10:20 a.m. ET (1520 GMT). Flight controllers plan to download more data and set up the lander to “phone home” if and when it receives more solar power after a three-week sleep through the chilly lunar night.

After the difficult landing on February 22, Intuitive Machines’ stock fell 3% on Thursday and has now lost over one-third of its value this week.

Although the space agency and six of its commercial payloads lost some data, NASA claims to have recovered some data from all six of its science payloads.

The 13-foot (4-meter) tall Nova-C-class lander was launched on February 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida using a Falcon 9 rocket provided by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Six days later, its orbit around the moon began.

After an 11-hour navigational hiccup and descent that left Odysseus landing in a sideways or sharply tilted position, which immediately hindered its operations, the six-legged vehicle made it to the lunar surface last Thursday.

The following day, Intuitive Machines claimed that the navigational problem was due to human error.

Prior to launch, flight readiness teams had forgotten to manually flip a safety switch, which prevented the vehicle’s laser-guided range finders from being activated. As a result, flight engineers had to quickly devise a backup plan while in lunar orbit.

According to an Intuitive executive who spoke with Reuters on Saturday, the safety switch malfunction was caused by the company’s cost- and time-saving decision to skip testing the laser system during pre-launch inspections.

Officials from Intuitive said they were unsure if Odysseus’s askew landing was ultimately due to the range finders failing and a last-minute workaround being substituted.

SOLAR PANELS AND ANTENNAE AFFECTED

However, the company reported last Friday that the spacecraft’s capacity to recharge its batteries was limited because two of its communication antennae were damaged and pointed in the incorrect direction. It also had solar panels facing the wrong way.

Consequently, Intuitive announced on Monday that it anticipated losing communication with Odysseus early on Tuesday, effectively ending the mission early.

Odysseus appeared to have landed next to a crater wall and was leaning at a 12-degree angle, according to NASA chief Bill Nelson, who spoke with Reuters on Tuesday. It was unclear, though, if this meant that Odysseus was leaning from the surface or from an upright position.

Engineers thought Odysseus had caught the foot of one of its landing legs on the lunar surface as it approached touchdown and toppled over before coming to rest horizontally, seemingly propped up on a rock, according to intuitive executives, who made the announcement on February 23.

The landing site of the spacecraft was visible as a tiny dot close to its intended location in the lunar south pole region in an image taken on Monday from an orbiting NASA spacecraft.

Odysseus was the first American spacecraft to set foot on the moon since NASA’s final crewed Apollo mission in 1972.

Furthermore, it was the first lunar landing in the history of a spacecraft built and operated for profit, and the first landing under NASA’s Artemis program, which intends to bring astronauts back to Earth’s natural satellite this decade.

Only four other nations’ space agencies have managed a “soft” moon landing to date: China, India, the former Soviet Union, and, most recently, Japan, whose lander also toppled over on its side last month.
The only nation to have sent people to the moon is the United States.