US moon lander Odysseus goes dormant a week after lopsided landing
By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
(Reuters) -Odysseus, the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century, lost power and went dormant on Thursday as it entered a frigid lunar nightfall, ending its mission a week after a lopsided touchdown that hindered operations and its scientific output.
Intuitive Machines, the Texas-based aerospace company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly Odysseus, said its ground control team had received a final «farewell transmission» from the spacecraft before it went dark on the moon's south pole region.
«Goodnight, Odie. We hope to hear from you again,» Intuitive said in an online update, referring to the spacecraft by the nickname its engineers had affectionately adopted for a lander they said proved to be more robust than expected.
Earlier in the day, Intuitive said its teams would program Odysseus to «phone home» to the company's ground control center Houston if and when the spacecraft receives enough solar power to reawaken in three weeks with the next sunrise over its landing site.
The company previously said Odysseus would likely run out of battery power sometime Wednesday night, just after its sixth full day on the moon, as the sun sank low on the lunar horizon and solar energy regeneration became insufficient.
But Intuitive said on Thursday morning that Odysseus was «still kicking,» and that flight controllers would seek to download a final stream of data transmitted the 239,000 miles (385,000km) back to Earth before contact was lost.
Intuitive's shares — which had nearly tripled and then plummeted in wild swings over the course of the mission — remained up about 20% from just before the launch, giving the company a market value of about $600 million.
LOPSIDED
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