A lunar day arrived in the area where the American Nova-C apparatus landed on the moon, but engineers failed to establish contact with it. On February 20, the Nova-C landing module (or “Odyssey”) of the American company Intuitive Machines landed on the moon. The approach failed due to a mistake made by engineers preparing the device for launch: The laser rangefinders necessary for accurate landing were turned off.

As a result, experts had to urgently install a patch on the apparatus, which allowed the use of NASA’s Doppler leader, which is part of the payload, instead of rangefinders, but these measures did not help. The module descended faster than expected, so one of Nova-C’s struts broke during hover and became tilted, making it difficult to communicate with Earth.

Since March 20th, Intuitive Machines engineers were trying to get signal from Nova-C but were unsuccessful, so they had to get signal officially. to announce It’s about completing your mission. By the way, the Japanese module, which arrived at the end of January, literally sat “on its head”, managed to “wake up” at the end of February and responded to the requests of JAXA specialists. The device did not have a good chance of surviving the lunar night, when the temperature on Earth’s natural satellite dropped to minus 173 degrees Celsius.