The developer company claims that everything is fine with the device, despite it tipping over. However, he did not share any photos after the flight. This may indicate that the device’s ability to send data to Earth is severely limited due to its incorrect location.

On February 23, 2024, the Odyssey lander of the private American company Intuitive Machines performed an automatic soft landing on the Moon. This was a historic achievement: before that, the United States had achieved automatic extraction of Selena in 1968 and manual extraction in 1972. Landing on a satellite of our planet is difficult: the first human landing on the moon did not end in tragedy because the astronauts automatically left the selected landing site, took control and landed in a slightly different place.

In 2024, the Japanese lander SLIM showed that even in the 21st century, landing on the moon carries significant risks even for players who have proven that they can do it in principle: it landed upside down. At the Intuitive Machines press conference held in Moscow on the night of February 24, company representatives admitted that they had experienced a similar problem. Their “Odysseus” drifted aside.

It is not clear how. Representatives of the company believe that the reason is the lack of lateral speed of the lander (but this is only a working hypothesis). According to the original design, it was supposed to be zero, but in practice it was about 2 miles per hour, the speed of a slow pedestrian. Intuitive Machines speculates that this extraordinary speed caused the machine to topple over.

At this stage, it is difficult to rule out other options (albeit less likely) while more information is expected from the device, which will take a few days. One of the landing legs may be broken or the landing site may have been chosen incorrectly. If there is a stone on it, this can cause one of the legs to “sit” on the stone, creating a tipping moment.

The unsuccessful landing site selection can be attributed to the fact that Odyssey, unlike most lunar landers, has a fully autonomous landing system and does not perform it under remote control. Even under ideal conditions, it’s difficult for computer vision to compete with the human ability to identify objects (like large rocks), and Odyssey also had technical difficulties with a number of cameras and sensors before landing, which is why it’s not a mainstream cluster of its own.

A third scenario is entirely theoretically possible: the drilling was at 80 degrees south latitude, very close to the south pole. In this part of the Moon, the surface consists largely of permafrost. Fuel combustion products can partially melt such a surface, resulting in an uneven descent. But the probability of this option is small: the “Odyssey” engines are relatively weak, it is difficult for them to provide such a scenario. At the same time, such a scenario is harder to rule out for more powerful engines, such as Starship, which will send American astronauts to the Moon in the second half of the 2020s.

Intuitive Machines claims that despite the not-so-successful landing, everything is fine with the device: solar panels receive energy from the Sun, scientific instruments point upwards, the antenna maintains communication with the Earth. However, they have not yet provided any photos of the apparatus after landing. This may indicate problems with the bandwidth of the communication channel caused by incorrect location of the device.

Odyssey has no radioisotope heat source, so it’s unlikely to survive the lunar night that’s coming in less than a decade. If the development company cannot receive sufficient data from the lander by this time, the mission will result in limited success. It is highly likely that future Intuitive Engine missions will be rescheduled to try to incorporate the lessons learned from this landing.