Good afternoon and welcome to NASA's Johnson Space Center in
Houston. I'm NILA for Ramsey with NASA
Communications. Thank you for joining us.
On February 22nd, Intuitive Machines, as I AM 1 mission
softly landed in the South Pole region of the Moon near
Mallaport. A named Odysseus.
The Lander completed a seven day journey to become the first US
soft landing on the Moon in more than 50 years.
Joining us today to provide insight on this historic mission
and to answer questions, we have Steve Altimas, Co Founder and
CEO at Intuitive Machines, Joel Kearns, Deputy Associate
Administrator for Exploration Science Mission Directorate at
NASA Headquarters in Washington, Doctor Tim Crane, Chief
Technology Officer and Co Founder at Intuitive Machines
and Doctor Prasan Desai, Deputy Associate Administrator of the
Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA
Headquarters. First, we'll start with some
initial remarks from our briefers before opening it up
for questions. We'll be taking your questions
on our phone bridge this afternoon.
So if you've joined us today, please plus star one to add your
name to the queue and ask your question.
We'll now begin with opening remarks from Steve.
Thank you, Dillifer. Well, hello everybody.
It's reflected before we came into the briefing studio this
afternoon that this is the first briefing about being on the
surface of the moon for the first time in about 52 years in
this room. So that's quite incredible and
it's a pleasure to be here. Intuitive Machines, Odysseus
Lander landed yesterday at 524 a central time.
We did have a stable controlled landing and a safe soft
touchdown. I'll give you a little bit of
description today about the the state of Odysseus or OD and it's
attitude on the surface and what what you can expect from it over
the coming days. It's pretty incredible.
It's it was a quite a spicy seven day.
Mission. To get to the moon and I'll give
you some fun facts about how far we've traveled and and how fast
we've gone. So just to begin with, the
vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site.
We do have communications with the with the Lander.
It's from the larger radio astronomy dishes around the
world that are part of our lunar telemetry network and to the
spacecraft from several of the antennas and two of the radios.
So that's phenomenal to begin with.
So we're beginning to now that we're on the goon hilly dish in
the United Kingdom, we're downloading and commanding,
downloading data from the from the buffers in the spacecraft
and commanding the spacecraft and trying to get you surface
photos because I know that everyone's hungry for those
surface photos. But we got some interesting data
that gives us a position, an attitude of where the where the
Lander is. And I'll explain that in a
moment. We have the sun impinging on the
solar arrays and charging our batteries.
We are providing power to the spacecraft and we're at 100%
state of charge. That's fantastic.
I talked to you about the communications, and we will be
taking an image, hopefully this weekend from the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter to find the Lander and pinpoint its
location in the South Pole region of the Moon.
If you can go to the photo here that we have, this is a photo
that I thought you'd find interesting that we'll release
to the public here. Here we're flying about 10
kilometers over the surface of Schaumburger Crater near the
South Pole region of the Moon. We're still about 200 kilometers
up, up range from from where our intended landing site is.
But here we have a one of our public affairs cameras taking
this beautiful image and you see how shadowed and you know
undulating the the terrain is and that's important to
understand how difficult it is to to land on the surface of the
moon. So thanks for that image.
Going back, I could say that it was quite phenomenal that if you
think about it, we were traveling 25,000 miles an hour
and we came down and touched down at about 6 miles an hour
with a down range traverse of about two miles an hour.
That's walking speed. So that's kind of just an
interesting metric for you. We traveled 2 1/2 times the
distance to the lunar surface. That's about 600,000 miles due
to the trajectory and the number of orbits that we've gone
through in doing that and in and in performing that incredible
deceleration. Our first of a kind liquid
oxygen, liquid methane, additively manufactured 3D
printed engine burned six times for a cumulative burn time of
over 20 minutes. It's just an incredible
performing machine and we're really proud to take that
technology to ATRL Level 9. I got to say something about the
the team. The OPS teams were cool under
pressure for the whole seven days of.
It was quite amazing to see him and work real space Cowboys.
And you know, we worked through all the difficulties.
If you think back from Apollo days, there wasn't 1 mission
that went absolutely perfectly. So you have to be adaptable, you
have to be innovative and you have to persevere.
And we persevered right up until the last moments to get this
soft touchdown like we wanted to.
Let me just talk briefly about attitude on the surface this a
little Lander. I'm going to pretend that's the
rock that the Landers leaning on.
We think we came down with. Like I said, about 6 miles an
hour this way and about two miles an hour this way and
caught a foot in the surface and the and the Lander has tipped
like this and we believe this is the surface the the orientation
of the Lander on the moon. We're getting sun moving this
way around the Lander, so the solar arrays are being powered
and we believe a little later we'll get Solar Sun on the top
deck solar array. The majority of our payloads are
all in view and we are collecting science and we've
collected science along the way to the moon and I've been
downloading that data, in particular, 3 payloads that are
positioned on the Lander. They have been active
operationally used in this in this mission, the Lane One
payload out of Marshall Space Flight Center.
We actually assisted us in determining our precise location
in space orbit determination we call it using a Doppler
measurement that was very useful and and as it was part of the
Deep Space Network it augmented our communications from our own
commercial network. The other one you've heard about
was the NASA Doppler LIDAR from Langley Research Center and we
integrated their telemetry stream into our NAV application
navigation application and we use that for our power descent
initiation. And then finally the one that
was very useful was a new technology out of Glenn Research
Center and that was the radio frequency mass gauging.
And that that instrument really gave us an understanding of what
what the propellant tank levels were, which helped us budget the
amount of propellant to take us all the way safely to the
surface of the moon. So very interesting mission so
far as we get more telemetry and turn more things on, we'll be
updating you over the coming days of the analysis and the
reconstruction of of you know the landing.
Tim can comment that on that a little bit today on how we, how
we did the power descent all the way to the surface and why we
believe in the data that I'm talking to you about today.
Yesterday we thought from just to clear up some confusion, we
thought we were upright and the reason was that the tanks we're
reading this is the X direction and the tanks were reading
gravity on the moon. At the fill levels, there were
still residuals in the tank and we saw those measurements in the
X direction. Well, that was stale telemetry.
So when we worked through the night to get other telemetry
down, we noticed that in the Z direction, this direction is
where we're seeing the tank residual tank quantities.
And so that's what tells us with certain fairly certain terms,
the orientation of the vehicle and hopefully we'll get a
picture here this weekend and and share it with you Milifer.
That's all I have. Thank you so much, Steve.
Next up we have Joel Kearns. Joel.
Hey, thank you, Noah. For first let me congratulate
Intuitive Machines for three major accomplishments.
The 1st, as Steve said is for having the first a successful
soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972.
The second is for being the first non government commercial
organization to actually touchdown safely on the surface
of the Moon. And the third is we're having a
touchdown .80° S latitude much closer to the South Pole of the
moon than any earlier AUS robotic or human explorers.
Let me give you some of the context for the importance of
Intuitive Machines accomplishment on their mission.
In 2017, the nation charged NASA to expand our scientific and
technical work in the area of the Moon science, technology and
human explorers under our Artemis initiative.
As part of that, NASA went down the path to to listen to what
industry had been telling us for some years, which is that for
robotic landing services that we should be able to purchase that
from US industry instead of doing it ourselves at NASA for
robotic systems. Now NASA is very good at
building and operating robotic probes throughout the solar
system, but we knew we'd be going back to the moon
repeatedly to do science and technical studies and eventually
human exploration. So we put into place this
commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative or Eclipse
to buy and effect the service to bring NASA cargo down to the
surface of the moon and have the data from those experiments
brought back to Earth by industry.
Intuitive Machines is one of the participants in that initiative
that's now been awarded 3 service contracts to bring NASA
equipment, experiments and cargo down to the surface of the moon.
And this was intuitive, Machines first attempt their first
mission to the moon carrying our cargo.
Now I've talked about all the potential advantages of having
industry do this for NASA. The industry had told us years
ago that they thought they were technically ready to do it.
That they thought if they specialized in doing it, that
they could probably do it at less cost and much more
frequently and much faster from initial order than NASA probably
could, since we would normally build a custom spacecraft for
every endeavor. And we've seen that so far in
the progress that our CLIPS vendors have made, as they're
working down to fly off their first missions in two of the
machines, though however, and doing a soft touchdown on the
moon has perverted the first real evidence that this is
possible to do. It's possible with today's
technology, with dedicated engineering and appropriate
financial management, to have a private company actually design
A spacecraft, develop a mission, buy a rocket, and fly all the
way to the moon at soft land on the surface of the moon.
Not just an area where we landed earlier decades ago near the
equator with the Apollo missions, but in the unusual
territory at the South Pole which is the focus of our future
human Artemis missions, this is a gigantic accomplishment.
On this particular mission we had the company bring 6 NASA
science and technology experiments on board down to the
lunar surface. They ranged to get to do studies
in science in looking at the electron density and plasma on
the surface of the moon. Technology studies such as
measuring a rocket plume impingement during landing,
navigation studies on the way to the moon down to the surface of
the moon, laser ranging fuel quantity as other investigations
and it's and interesting enough when we started this we had put
together a list of different instruments and payloads that
the commercial lunar payload services companies could
volunteer to take down to the surface of the moon.
And intuitive machines pick the complement of five payloads
which we later augmented with the radio frequency mass gauge
fuel measurement experiment. And intuitive machines pick the
number of payloads and experiments from NASA to to
bring down which is Steve Widdell greatly benefited them
during the execution of their mission.
So at this point today is Intuitive machines looks to make
sure they understand the status of the Odysseus vehicle.
We are already looking back at scientific and technological
data that we accumulated during the transit out to the moon
during the deorbit operations, and we're looking forward to
getting even more data as intuitive machines figure
finishes the checkout of Odysseus now.
In doing so, we knew at NASA when we went out to gather this
by Commercial Services that we had these great potential
benefits, but we also had risks. We knew, for example, no one had
previously done this. We knew we were asking industry
to do an incredibly difficult thing to do to go from those
high speeds of orbital velocity all the way down to the very
slow speeds at A to get to a particular position on the moon
where we wanted them to land and intuitive machines
Accomplishment for this actually shows everyone that this is this
approach will work and we look forward to using it over and
over in the future. Nullifer.
Thank you so much. We'll now hand it over to Tim.
Thank you, Nullifer. Very excited to be here today.
They they told me to smile before the the press conference
and I can't help but smile anyway because we landed on the
moon a little bit about Odysseus.
Odysseus is a mostly autonomous vehicle.
Our operations crew would monitor the vehicle during
flight, We'd provide some trajectory updates, parameter
updates, and that's what got us into lunar orbit.
The lunar descent is different though.
During orbit we would prepare for maneuvers.
We'd watch the maneuver and then know that we had time to recover
afterwards and replan for the next stage.
But lunar powered descent is the end game.
There is no after. You're either successful or you
fail. And so the last Rev around the
moon, we buttoned up any last minute changes we wanted on the
vehicle, and there were a few that we may talk about today,
and basically the vehicle disappeared behind the far side
of the moon. We have lost the signal for 25
minutes. Everybody got up and went to the
bathroom. There was nothing to do but wait
for the signal to come back on. It was amazing how quickly we
adapted to continuous communications during transit to
regular losses of signal being a part of our life because we're
circling the moon. Once we came up around the North
Pole of the moon, we were in a polar orbit.
The vehicle was completely autonomous.
We watched as the onboard systems pointed our cameras to
the moon. We processed over 10,000 images
onboard with our own machine learning algorithms to manage
the speed of the vehicle and the guidance system decided based on
the propulsion system are available thrust levels, orbital
velocity and distance to the target near the South Pole.
When the right time to turn the engines were were that's power
descent initiation and the engines came on approximately 13
minutes before landing. We were at full thrust for what
we call Braking 1. Basically, we were trying to
slow down from approximately 3600 mph to something more like
30 mph near the landing site That's breaking one the vehicle
performed Florida State. Our our main engine thrust was
good. Our thrust control was perfect
engine performance. It has exceeded expectations in
many ways and flight control my my personal background kept the
vehicle pointed exactly where it was supposed to go for the
entire burn. We monitored down until a pitch
over event so early in the trajectory.
The vehicle is basically flying sideways with respect to the
moon and we're flying in One Direction and the engine is
slowing us down to take that velocity out of the vehicle.
Once we get within a kilometer of the landing site, however,
the vehicle goes into what we call a pitch over and this
brings another set of cameras into alignment with the landing
site. At that point we lost calm,
which we knew we would do because we switched from one set
of antennas to another and then we regained communications all
the way until approximately 200 meters above the landing site.
Then there was a tense moment where we did not have regular
communications, but our dedicated radio and ground
operations crew found the signal, and within an hour or so
we were getting the first data down from the surface of the
men. I could not be prouder of our
operations team and our engineers for putting together
Odysseus, which was a marvelous machine, And to look at the moon
every night now and know that we have new hardware there that we
had a hand in building in our lifetime, something I couldn't
say before. It really was a a magical,
magical day. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Tim. And now, finally, we'll hand it
over to Prasan. Thank you.
So first and foremost, congratulations to Intuitive
Machines, an amazing successful landing success story.
You know, one of the things that we from a technology and space
tech want to do is we want to go with repeated access to various
parts of the solar system to do this tech demonstration.
Because in our view technology drives exploration.
And we had a number of experiments on this technology
demonstrations on this Lander and one was called to be used
operationally. And I'll talk a little bit about
that, but that this aspect of a successful landing really allows
to pointing on to what Joel said is repeated access to the lunar
surface. We have a slew of technologies
we want to demonstrate as well as many science certificate
instruments that we want to send for understanding the lunar
environment. And by having a successful story
like Today, Yesterday that happened, it allows us for
setting up the next set of projects that we want to fly and
demonstrate right. One of the things that we wanted
to do is trying to do as much as possible testing on the ground,
but that only gets us to a certain technology readiness
level, which is typically TRL 5, sometimes six.
What that means is we're we're not quite in the environment
that we want to be in. And so This is why we want to go
and experiment in space or on a lunar surface, wherever it
happens to be. The the one of the big
technology demonstrations on on this landing was the navigation
Doppler Lidar. We were hoping through the test
of flying on this mission was to get it to TRL 6, which is the
relevant environment, the lunar environment.
However, with the successful ingestion of it during landing,
we were able to get a operational system now TRL 9,
which is it's ready to be used from now on right as opposed to
further testing. This wasn't totally by accident.
The teams at NASA Langley Research Center that helped
develop this technology did a lot of development over the
years, as well as working with intuitive machines to see about
ingesting this data if necessary.
Fortunately, all that hard work came to bear yesterday when
there was a technical issue and the teams decided that hey, it
was best to try to do the switch and rely on this tech
demonstration. Everything we understand from
the telemetry we received, which is limited to this point until
we get all the data back, that the technology performed Florida
State better than expected performance.
It acquired range and velocity data well above the required 5
kilometers altitude as it's descending.
And the reason why we need this data for successful landing is
as Landers come down, we would ideally like to have them come
straight down. But because there's errors in
the all the operations of the system, you wind up being a
little bit going laterally going there.
This measurement is really to try to get an understanding of
that lateral motion so that the system can counteract that and
zero out that lateral motion to come down straight down.
So you need these type of measurements to make that
happen. This is one set of technologies
that allows to do that. There are a slew of other ones
to make the landings even more reliable and safer that we hope
to demonstrate on future landings.
And so having this successful landing today allows us to gear
up and get ready to do more of this going forward to enable the
Artemis endeavor of repeated access to the surface and
eventual landing of humans on the on the surface and and
sustained presence on the surface with infrastructure
laying it down. And so this is the first step in
allowing for that and a great day for allowing us to get ready
for more to come as we go forward.
Thank you, Prasan, and thank you to our briefers for those
initial remarks. We'll now open it up to
questions. Again, if you've joined us on
the line today or on our phone Bridge, please press * one to
submit your question. Once your name is called, please
state to whom you'd like to direct your questions.
Once your question has been answered you, you will be muted.
But if your question has already been answered, you will push
Star 2 to withdraw it. Let's open our phone bridge.
First up, we have Gina Sinceri with ABC News.
Gina. Question is for either Steve or
Tim. What was your Hail Mary moment
during that where you went? We think we can make.
This work and we just made it work.
What was? What were those moments?
Or were there more than one? Well, I think there were several
of those moments. Like I said, it was a spicy
mission. I'll let Tim comment a little
bit, but you know the idea to pull the range telemetry from
the the, the NASA Doppler Lidar was interesting and change out
the laser range Finder call outs in the navigation application.
All that was very straightforward to go calculate.
Part of that was put in the table, but part of that had to
mean that we had to rewrite the navigation application software.
And when you do that. To upload it to the vehicle you
actually have to stop guidance navigation and control.
And when we ran that in the simulation and we ran that on
the flat sat, it did not like being rebooted like that.
That's software and we saw the guidance drift way off.
We saw a lot of helium usage and and that was very sporty.
So I think in a very time, crunch time, getting ready for
power descent, we had to work feverishly to get that sequence
of events, almost like Fred Hayes in a in a in Apollo 13.
We're trying to figure out the sequence of events to
reinitialize the software, in particular, reinitialize
navigation. And so that was done in a very
sporty way and it was brilliantly executed by the
team. And so that was the one that had
us all biting our nails just a little bit, because once you
start power descent, there's no going back like Tim said.
Tim, do you have another one? Yeah, there there was.
I I will say on that one a parallel effort for sure.
So we had one team rewriting the code, we had one team testing
procedures and then another team once the code was written
pushing it up on the vehicle moving into place.
That synchronization came down to a Florida State executed
reboot of the navigation system that allowed us to successfully
land. So that was exciting.
Another exciting moment we had after our TCM one our trajectory
correction maneuver we discovered that our engine
pointing geometry had an error in it and we had to study that a
bit and we found the the reason why we had a geometry linkage
that was a little bit different than we expected.
Very difficult to test how that linkage to the main gimbal would
respond under full thrust in space.
And so we were able to use flight data to correct that.
But that was another area where we had to patch the software to
put that correction in place. And you know, we became very
proficient at it. I will say, and you hear this in
the space industry a lot that we stand on the shoulders of
giants. The work we were doing was built
upon work people had done before us.
NASA score flight software is a big part of what we do on the
flight vehicle and it has a lot of the capabilities to reload
and reinitialize software built into it.
And we were able to take advantage of that because of the
foresight that people who had done space missions before had
invested in in that piece of technology and we used it to
great effectiveness going forward.
Great. Thank you.
Next up, we have Marsha Dunn with The Associated Press.
Hi. My questions are for you, Steve.
What's your best guess for how close you are to the targeted
touchdown area? And you said a lake caught the
surface. Do you think the Lander came in
builded and it's to catch a lake like that, put it as caught on a
rock, and then belly flopped? And do you think Odysseus was
ever upright, even for a moment or two, or do you think it just
landed on its side from the ghetto?
Thanks. Well, thank you Marsha for that
question. We are reconstructing with the
data that we get, what we think happened.
My theory is just a theory until we get an actual picture and see
what happened. But if you pass me the model,
Tim, I'll show you here is if we're coming down, we came down
a little bit faster. We were supposed to come down at
1m per second, which is about two miles an hour, and we're
supposed to null the lateral velocity, which was was supposed
to be 0, and we're coming straight down.
We had about two miles an hour going this way.
And so if you're coming down at six miles an hour is what we
think, and moving 2 miles an hour and you catch a foot, we
might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over
gently. Like I like I said, we have to
go look at when the main engine cut off was to see if the main
engine had any coupling effect to that or not.
I can't tell you for sure. It'd be good to see the health
of the landing gear and see how that all looks.
And so it'll be a few days before we get all of that put
together and reconstructed. That's an action I've already
given the team and I look forward to the answer to help
inform our future flights. I can add to that that after
pitch over we have a hazard relative navigation system that
generates measurements at 1 Hertz.
This is our optical processing and we generated 84 measurements
and process 79 of those. So 84 is important because we
have an approximately a 122nd timeline from pitch over to
landing. So the fact that we generated 84
accounts for a portion of that timeline, they're not
necessarily continuous. The fact that we process 79 of
them and they were accepted by the common filter that we have
in our software means that there was very good agreement between
the inertial measurement unit and our our camera velocity
measurement and the NDL navigation Doppler lighter on
board. With those all in agreement that
means we had roughly 90 seconds out of 120 seconds guaranteed
stable flight coming in. So we were very close to the
vertical phase. We don't have the data from that
interval yet. And so we're waiting to see what
that is. But that's a really good
indication that we were in stable control and vertical at
the time we touched down. Thank you.
Bill Harwood with CBS News. Hey, thank you very much.
I think this is for Steve. How do you guys know it's
resting on a rock as it were and not on its side?
In other words, how many degrees of vertical did your hike
readings lead you to think if if you even got a number like that?
And are there any payloads on board that simply cannot work in
the current orientation? Thanks.
Well, I'll let Tim address part of it.
But our reconstruction by based on how much power we're getting
off of this solar array says that it that it has to be
somewhat elevated off the surface horizontally.
So that's why we think it's on a on a rock or the foot is in a in
a in a crevice or something to to get to hold it in that that
attitude. Fortunately for most, most of
the payloads are exposed to the outside above the surface that's
down the the, the panel that's down towards the surface.
That panel only had a single payload on it and it's not an
operational payload, it's it's a static payload.
And that one, we're still going to try to take a picture of that
payload if we can. And that would meet those
objectives of taking a photograph of of that art cube
that's in the on that panel and that one that's pointed towards
the surface of the of the moon. So we're going to try to
download all the pictures and see if we got got that picture
in view. Tim, any more insight?
We also have some inertial measurement unit data.
We've turned a lot of the the flight instrumentation off on
the vehicle for power management purposes.
But before we did we were able to get some packets and measure
lunar gravity and most of that lunar gravity was in the Z
direction on that model which is up along fairly close to level.
So there is something whether we run into a slope, which would
also explain a tip over if there's more slope than than we
anticipated at touchdown. So the inertial measurement unit
gives a very strong indication that this is up and and those
sensors are very, very exquisite.
So it's a confirmation of what we're seeing from the tanks.
Exactly what the material is that's underneath the Lander is
something we hope to get some imagery from over the next
coming days and and find out more.
Where is eager to see those images as the public is.
Yeah. And and I would add in terms of
the technology payloads, we've already gotten data along the
way to say they've been successful, right.
So the radio frequency mass gauge has been working since
long, you know, as soon as we got into our low Earth orbit and
going on the way. So we've gotten data all along
that way as well as during the descent which we're still
waiting for telemetry on that. The navigation Doppler or LIDAR,
we got that real time going down.
So we know that worked very well and successful aspect of it,
right, The scalps, the stereo cameras, we're waiting for the
pictures to come back there, but you know everything else seems
to be working very well. So we anticipate that that
worked well during the descent as well and just waiting for the
data to come back to, to analyze to see how that went.
So a lot of the payloads have already been successfully
demonstrated. Yeah, I know.
This is Joel. What I'd say is that in addition
to what Prasad and Tim said about the fact that so much data
was acquired during transit out to the moon, long lunar Warburg
and descent, Of course we'll evaluate if there's any
particular measurements that we can take because of the vehicle
configuration, but in general, we expect to get a lot of data
and a lot of measurements from the instruments, both science
and technology. Yeah, I have an add to that too.
You know, the NDL is a perfect example of a problem solved.
But the radio frequency mass gauge was also something that we
used for a problem avoided. We had a temperature sensor on
one of our tanks and we fly. Cryogenic fluids are very, very
cold for propellant and a temperature sensor was
recording, reporting back colder than we had anticipated.
Well, that could have been indicative of a leak.
And so we were beginning to spin up some contingencies.
Well, what if we have a leak, What do we do?
But because we had the radio frequency mass gauge, we're able
to confirm that our tank masses were stable and we just had a
little bit of an anomalous sensor reading and that avoided
a problem and we didn't spend more energy going through that.
So that technology is one that maybe isn't quite as dramatic as
a as a Late Orbit software reboot, but nonetheless gave us
confidence going through the mission.
Great. Thank you so much for your
insight on that. Next up we have Ken Chang with
the New York Times. Ken.
Yes, hi. Thank you.
I was wondering I guess for Tamara and Steve for a TikTok of
what happened after lunar insertion.
It looks like the orbit is lower than what was in the press press
kit and then you had another burn that evening and then you
avoided the DOI burn and and then you had it, it moved up to
launch of the landing time. So I was wondering what the very
orbits were and how that affected the landing time.
And also, when did you find out that you had a bomb based
alternator? I missed the last part.
I'll start with the first part. Kenneth, do you want to ask the
last part again? When did you find out that you
had a laser altimeter? Yeah.
OK. Laser altimeter.
So the first part of the question was about the lunar
orbit insertion and what happened after that, right?
If I understand your question right, well, we were having some
difficulty with communications around the world communicating
from the different configurations and the different
dishes that we had around the world up to our radios.
And we have Poisonics radios and Talus Alinea radios and some of
those that Talus Alinea radios have a range beacon and we have
a frequency that we know, a carrier frequency that we're
operating on. And some of the dishes were
smaller around the world. So in certain parts of the world
we had a weaker signal and we would lose that carrier lock.
And when that carrier lock goes down, you can't get a good orbit
determination. And there was a shift in the
ranging beacon. So that shift and that turn
around ratio in the ranging beacon is such that you had some
inaccuracy, we had some inaccuracy.
So we got the best data we could possibly get going into our
lunar orbit insertion burn. But what we found was that was
slightly elliptical. Actually it was elliptical, not
highly elliptical, but it was elliptical orbit And so we were
not comfortable necessarily with our the proximity to to, to the
to the South Pole area. We were a little too close for
our own comfort. So we decided to come in and do
a a a raise of our of our periloon position.
And we did that very quickly, autonomously and put us in a
safer configuration for the mission and be prepared.
And that burn we did in such a way that it eliminated the need
for a de orbit insertion burn, very small burn before we did
power descent. When we were looking at our
position around the moon, we decided to take a laser range
Finder, power it on and ping the surface to see how close we were
because we're having trouble with this orbit determination in
this Doppler measurement that we're trying to get.
And we saw that that laser didn't fire and what we found
was that there's a safety enable switch because it's not an ISAFE
laser. That safety enable switch is in
the box and was not disabled. So it's like having a a safety
on a on a on a on a firearm, it's it's for ground processing
and that was an oversight on our part.
And so those laser range finders could not be turned on and we
couldn't manipulate that enable switch or disable switch with
the software. And so those range finders had
been tested and would have worked if we'd had caught that
oversight and remove that enable before or disable before flight.
So I think that got your question.
Tim, anything to add on that? No, that's right.
I think the key thing was we have an incredible flight
dynamics team who were able to determine that from the orbit we
were in, we could raise Paralun with a lunar correction maneuver
that they had built in with the foresight to trim the orbit.
If we had some unexpected conditions and it basically put
us into our descent orbit about four or five Revs before we we
nominally would have done that. But the orbit still phased over
the landing site in the right way and gave us a great
opportunity to execute power descent.
Thank you so much for that Lauren Grush with Bloomberg.
Hi. Thank you so much for taking my
question. I think this might be for Steve
or Tim. I'm curious if you've been able
to determine if the tipping damaged the Lander at all based
on the rock that it's leaning on.
Is there any concern of further degradation because of the
position that it's in? Thanks.
Well, again Lauren, we're hopeful to get pictures and
really do an assessment of the structure and assessment of all
the external equipment. I we we are hopeful that the top
deck solar array is not damaged and that as the sun comes around
the Lander will be able to get some power generation from the
top deck solar array which which is now vertical.
And so we'll see what that means.
But so far we have quite a bit of operational capability even
though we're we're tipped over and so that's that's really
exciting for us and we we're continuing the surface
operations mission as a result of it.
Thank you. Next up we have Andrea
Linefelder with the Houston Chronicle.
Andrea. Hi, these questions are for Tim
Crane, that final orbit you took.
I just want to make sure that was specifically to implement
the software path to use NASA's LIDAR tech demo for landing.
Also, Tim on Twitter or excuse me, X, you mentioned a big role
maneuver. Was this part of the plan?
If not, what caused the role maneuver and did that create any
complications? And finally, I was hoping you
could walk us through some of the communication issues
experienced right after landing. Was it difficult to get a signal
because it was at an angle or was it other challenges related
to being unstoppable? Thank you.
Thanks, Andrea. I did not catch the first part
of your question. Could you, could you repeat
that? Sorry, the first part was you
know that final orbit that you took that kind of pushed back
the landing, Was that specifically to implement the
software patch that that helps you land with the NASA's LIDAR
tech demo? Yes, OK.
Thanks. It was we were we were in good
position to land at approximately 3:30.
But the the procedures that that Steve was talking about, what
order do we bring down the, the flight control, the guidance, do
we inhibit RCS? How do we do that in such a way
that there's no unexpected consequence on the vehicle?
For example, if we turned off guidance navigation and control
but didn't turn off the RCS control valves, they could
listen to noise on the computer instead of controls to zero, and
we could open up the valves and and lose control.
So we were very, very deliberate about working through in what we
call a flat sat, which is basically the spacecraft
equipment laid out in a lab driven by a simulation.
We were very deliberate about working that procedure so that
when we shut the software down, we could bring it back up
safely. There was no harm to the
vehicle. We had the patch ready in time
for the first landing attempt. We hadn't come to a satisfactory
procedure yet and we had to get it right.
And so Steve and I conferred. It would be a little bit more
fuel to catch the, the, the OR bort once around.
But again, our flight dynamics and automation team had written
software that gave us a great amount of flexibility to control
Odysseus. And we're really at a special
time in our lunar program and intuitive machines where most of
our operators are also the subject matter experts who built
these systems. So we had incredible insight
what was going on. We had great confidence we can
make this work, but we needed a little bit more time.
And so we made the call to abort once around and implemented the
patch at that time so that when we had that final orbit we were
in high confidence of landing the role maneuver.
At the end we had made some decisions.
You know every, every vehicle has a mass limit and you're
trying to optimize performance versus mass.
We had flown a vehicle with fixed antenna and in order to
fly with fixed antenna we had to look at what our, our landing
orientation was at the South Pole.
We landed. In fact you'll see in this model
there's white, white paint on on some surfaces and and black
paint on others. That's because we were going to
land on the South, near the South Pole, and the sun was
going to illuminate the solar arrays, as you can imagine, and
then also these white surfaces to reject heat.
But on the other side we have the cold side, and it gets very,
very cold if you're not in direct sunlight on the moon.
So we painted that black to catch reflected light off the
moon and warm them up. So as we were coming down, we
wanted our navigation cameras pointed to the ground.
Then we wanted our navigation ground cameras pointing to the
ground after we pitched over. But in landing, we had a planned
roll maneuver to bring our antennas to face the earth, and
so in order to accommodate that we had a planned roll maneuver.
It was not unexpected that the roll maneuver would occur.
It was also expected that there would be a loss of
communications as we switched from our 1-2 antenna pair to our
3-4 antenna pair. Thank you so much for that.
Next up we have Chris Davenport from the Washington Post.
Chris. Hey, thanks everyone.
For Tim and Steve, just regarding that audible you had
to make up and I want to see if I can come down to some of the
chronology to get a sense of how the day unfolded for yesterday.
About what time is it that that you realize that that that laser
range Finder wasn't working and then did you immediately know
that you could go to the MDL system was just something you
had planned on as a contingency or did you kind of make this up
on the fly and decide work on it, you know, in real time
yesterday? Thanks.
I'll I'll start and Tim will add a lot of color to this because
this one, this one was like Gina asked was the Hail Mary issue.
When we went around the night before and we made that laser
range Finder measurement, it looked like the laser fired, we
got an enable in the data, but when we did a deeper analysis
analysis of it, it was it was not actually fired, it was an
error in the telemetry. So when we dug into it, we that
morning, this was the morning of landing, we called MDA and asked
them what they thought about it and could we convert that
physical enable switch to a software change to command that
switch. And they indicated no, there's a
physical cut out for this and not a software driven cut out
for this. So we now I get into the control
room. I can laugh about it now.
And Tim was on console as the mission director and I said,
Tim, we're going to have to land without laser range finders.
And his face got absolutely white because it was like a
punch in the stomach that we were going to lose the mission.
And we went around and we said what are we going to do?
We started to hack into the OS, the operating system of the
laser range Finder to see if there was a way we could trick
it some way. We thought about running a
simulated table of the power descent phase and like predict
with like some parameters how we might land and there's just way
too much variables, way too many variables in that running a
simulation table in against the real world situation.
So that wasn't going to get work.
And so Tim and I were walking through the halls and trying to
find the experts. And he came up with the idea
that says, why don't we just Plumb the high beam laser and
the low beam laser from the NDL into the registers for the HRN
laser range Finder and the TRN laser range Finder.
He came up with that while we're walking down the hall in a
hurried way. And it only would work if we
ingested the range measurement in the NAV application.
And we had done that because we had worked with the team at
Langley for so long with the NASA Doppler Lidar that we were
able to have that instrument in shadow mode to give them better
quality data. And because it was in shadow
mode, we had that measurement in the navigation application and
it was just a brilliant piece of insight by Doctor Crane to say
let's clear the register and put those two lasers in as the as
the actual makeshift laser range finders.
So that's kind of how it unfolded and we needed more
time. So we delayed and took the risk
and said let's delay an orbit and switch to a later landing
time because the landing time was originally around 3/3/23 or
3/24 and we delayed till, you know 5/24 as you know, based on
a 2 hour orbit around the moon. So, Tim, anything else?
Yeah, it it it's it sounds easy in retrospect.
We had the the navigation Doppler Lidar already plumbed in
the navigation system and had the range rate data.
So the three beams on the the NDL produce a velocity
measurement as pursuant and talked about they also produce a
range measurement and we were not using the range measurement,
we were we had just the range rate as a backup to our optical
systems. But because it was already
plumbed in there we had to rewrite those rewrite time tags
into our measurement loader. But the challenge was the the
lasers. So we have, we have these two
navigation pods on the vehicle. If you can zoom in there, maybe,
maybe not. Anyways, there are these two
navigation pods that have the cameras.
There you go, 2 navigation pods on either side of the vehicle
that have cameras and the laser range finders point in the same
direction as the cameras and those angles were optimized for
our flight trajectory to give us the best measurements to land
softly. The NDL was under one of these
and its angles were optimized to test the extent of its
performance, not necessarily to feed our navigation system, but
to test the sensor because it was a technology development.
So after we figured out we could write the measurements into the
laser range Finder, we had to quickly tell the computer that
the laser beams were pointed in different directions.
And so there were a number of attitude transformations of it's
not in the same location, it's not in the same orientation, and
if you've ever seen engineers doing right hand rule
transformations, there were a lot of broken wrists.
Put it down here as people were trying to figure out which way
is it pointing, and I will tell you that in normal software
development for a spacecraft, this is the kind of thing that
would have taken a month of writing down the math, cross
checking it with your colleagues, doing some simple
calculations to prove that you think you're right, putting it
into a simulation, running that simulation 10,000 times,
evaluating the performance. Usually you find an error
because you did something of that rotation wrong and you roll
it back and you go again. Our team basically did that in
an hour and a half and it worked, so it was one of the
finest pieces of engineering I've ever had a chance to be
affiliated with. I'd like to add to that that the
performance of the navigation Doppler Leader technology and
parallel that was developed by NASA's Langley Research Center
was outstanding and it was reliable and that's what got got
Intuitive Machine some of the key data they needed in order to
soft land. Great.
Thank you so much for that. Eric Berger with Ars Technica.
Eric. Hi, thanks very much.
Congratulations. Question for two questions for
Tim or Steve. First of all about propellant
management, I'm curious how the cryogenic boil off matched up
with your expectations and kind of how much prop you had left at
the end. And then what is the transfer
data transfer rate you're getting now versus what you
expected? You know, trying to get some
sense of how much data you're going to get back over the next
week or so versus your original expectations?
Thanks. Propellant.
So actually the the cryogens did very well and and just a
correction Eric our system doesn't really have boil off.
Our tanks are rated to hold the pressure of of the methane.
It's very close to space storable really what we're
worried about isn't a propellant boil off it is temperature
management. We want to keep that cryogenic
fluid very cold because the density of that fluid in our
engine is what gives us the power of of that thrust system.
So really what we were looking at throughout the flight was did
our insulation plan and our isolation of the the cryogenic
tanks from the hot material, the spacecraft, did that give us the
right thermal protection so that we did not heat, heat that cold
system up and that worked very well.
We found ourselves in a very good situation with propellant
all the way through the mission. We did have we used a little bit
more helium than we thought throughout the mission and had
to adjust our our control approach for that and that was
probably the area of concern we run a little bit low on on
helium. So a lot of lessons learned
there on how we'll manage that going forward that will play out
very well. And in terms of the the
bandwidth, that's difficult to answer.
One of the things that's happening right now, we built
fault detection technology into our COM system that if we're not
getting a command heartbeat up on two of the antenna pair, it
will go through a sequence of powering the radios off,
restarting them. And then if they still don't get
the heartbeat command signal from the from the earth, then it
switches to the other antenna pair.
And so one of the first things we're trying to do is get out of
that flight configuration and stay locked in on 2 antennas.
But with that flip flopping back and forth, right now we're we're
trying to get the command up to move out of that flight mode.
But there's a beat frequency of we go from a good configuration,
the one that's down and then we're about to come up to the
new one and we move to a new antenna.
And so we're working through that.
When we left to come over for the briefing, I think they just
about had that solved. But I can't give you a strong
number because there's a variability there as we go from
different antennas to different dishes around the world.
Great. Thanks again.
Jeff Faust with Space News. Jeff.
Good afternoon. Maybe just to quickly follow up
on Eric's question for Tim. What is your best guess that how
good the data rate you can eventually get once you optimize
the system for the Lander and its configuration?
And then also I think this question was asked.
Earlier I may have missed the answer.
What's your best guess in terms of margin of error of how close
you are to the predicted landing site, How many kilometers away
you think you touched down? Thanks.
Yeah, great questions. Thanks Jeff.
Best guess you know in terms of bit rate that's hard to say
because that does vary with the antenna size and the sensitivity
beach antenna, but we expect to get most of the mission data
down once we stabilize our configuration.
In terms of landing accuracy, you know with without precision
navigation sensors on board the best you can expect to land on
an IMU only landing system would probably be in the four to five
kilometer range. However, our optical navigation
sensors perform Florida State. In fact our optical measurements
looked better on the scopes than they had in simulations.
So I'm confident that we're well within probably a 2 to 3
kilometer accuracy of the landing site for this mission
would have been better if we'd had our full complement of
sensors as expected. And just as a closing point,
Jeff, on this question is that we're planning working with the
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Arizona State University
faculty to do a pass to see if LRO can locate our position
precisely and give us a latitude and longitude and we expect that
measurement that pass to occur this weekend.
Thank you so much for that. Joey Roulette with Reuters.
Joey. Hey, thanks for doing this.
Question for Tim or Steve, since the Lander is on its side, I was
wondering if you could go into how that will limit what the
Lander can do with you know, which operational capabilities
are impacted by that and which you know, science objectives, if
any won't be able to be conducted because it's on its
side? Thanks.
Well, I'll comment initially. Like I mentioned, we don't have
active payloads on the panel EI believe is what's facing the
surface of the moon and so therefore the the active
payloads that need communications and need to give
up, we need to command and we get the telemetry out are all
exposed to the outside, which is very fortunate for us.
We do have an antenna, however, that are pointed at the surface
and those antennas are unusable for transmission to to Earth,
back to Earth. And so that really is a limiter,
our ability to communicate and get the right right data down so
that you know, we get everything we need for the mission.
I think it's the most compromised from being on our
side. And anything I missed him?
No, that was it. Well, maybe one I just thought
of his. I I was telling you before about
the solar panel on the top deck we had had to angle that at
about 30° tilt up for for landing on the South Pole.
That was one of the engineering changes we made when NASA asked
us to move to the towards the South Pole region.
Now we've tipped over and we don't know the health of that
solar panel. It would be great to get a
picture and or wait until the sun comes around and see if we
get any battery charging off that solar panel.
So we'll see we're in a great state of charge with the
batteries. We're getting plenty of sun on
the on the horizontal and now horizontal solar panel and we'll
just have to wait and see with that that other panel.
Thank you so much, Jonathan Surry, Fox News.
Thank you for taking my question and congratulations everyone.
My question is also for Tim or Steve.
Your team had to essentially rewrite the instruction manual
several times while in flight, not just for troubleshooting but
also adapting to 1st in space performance of that new engine.
Could you give us an idea of how many people were involved with
the process, and did the discussions take place in a
single war room, or were you conferencing in experts from
multiple locations? Just give us an idea of the
human logistics involved. So I'll give you a rough
overview and then Tim can comment kind of how how it went
over the seven day period. We the operations team was
structured in into three shifts, red, white and blue shift.
Those shifts were supposed to work 8 hour shifts and then do a
a handover between shifts. But between those teams, those
teams are about 10 individuals and the other team that we
activated was called team four. And the team four was a handful
of us senior leaders that and engineers that could analyze and
take the workload off of the operations teams.
So if the operations teams are are wrestling with a
particularly thorny problem, they would call team four and
say get in here and let's work on this, work on this for us and
give us a a solution. So we would pull in the subject
matter experts for any of the disciplines that we would need
to solve any particular problem and we would work in a war room
sense outside the control room to tackle that problem.
We would have for example to activate and bring up the
simulation or activate and bring up the flat set.
We would run analysis cases. We would call the vendors like
we called the MDA about the laser laser rage finders.
We called NASA and talked about the Deep Space Network with that
orbit determination need also all of that chatter in the back
that was handled by I would say about 30 people that that would
work a given problem on and off based on the on the discipline.
But what had happened during the mission was that red, white and
blue team and the teams and team four ended up working nearly
around the clock. We really could have staffed
more, but it takes a lot of expertise to staff those teams.
And we ended up kind of melding into, we're all working on this
last problem through power, descent and we collapsed into a
single red, white and blue team, all of it.
And to get that solved, which we're going to go back and look
at and see, you know, we really, really work the team hard.
They're put a lot of hours in. I think one of the longest days
was 48 hours long and another another day was 40 hours long
for some of the folks. And that's, you know, just just
working too hard. And we need to give them rest so
they can be bright and make the right engineering decisions.
So we got some lessons learned in that area, but we did it and
it was worth it. And it was a whole idea of
persevering through the challenges and never giving up,
Never ever give up until the last ditch solution you could
find and then keep thinking about it if it didn't work.
So just a testament to a great operations team.
Yeah, I'll add to that. You know, our operations concept
was a, a a blend of. Human spaceflight for space
station and space shuttle, we have, you know that's in our
culture here in the Houston area.
Some of us had worked on the all hadamorphous project at NASA,
which was in some way has the DNA that that led into Nova C We
had people with a military operations background and then
we had people from commercial network operations.
And so we put all of that together and we came up with our
own unique blend of how we were going to do spacecraft
operations. And a big focus of that was the
people inside the room on the red, white and blue teams, Keep
the vehicle alive, keep the vehicle alive and doing what
it's supposed to do. And then all the mission
directors, myself, Jack 2, Fish Fisher and Trent Martin, we had
the responsibility to interface with Team Four.
And we would be able to say, I have this problem, I can't solve
it with the resources I have in the room and and do what we're
supposed to do. And so we would shed those out
to Team Four and they did an amazing job.
Whether it was talking to the vendors or developing a
procedure, they took that off the plate and that load balance.
Even though he's right, you know, I joked this morning that,
you know, how was your day? I said, well, this mission was
the longest seven day day of my life.
But it it really, it really allowed us to focus on keeping
the vehicle alive and keeping it moving on its way to the moon
and doing the things we needed to do while problems and
anomalies could be solved in the backroom.
And you know, this is a story that everybody on that team is
going to be able to tell for generations about how we landed.
Irene Klotz, Aviation Week, your line is open.
Thanks. If I understand that incredible
sequence of events correctly, was it just serendipity that a
situation developed with that elliptical orbit that caused you
to try and get the laser range Finder data where you realized
it wasn't working before it would have actually been needed?
And when during the touchdown, would that laser range binder
nominally have been activated? I think I understood Irene, the
question. It was actually fortuitous that
we had an elliptical orbit after lunar orbit insertion, because
we would not have arbitrarily activated the laser range
finders prior to power descent. We tested them on the ground, we
flew them on aircraft, we flew them on helicopters, we and and
we assumed after all that testing they worked.
So the first usage of those laser range finders was during
was supposed to be during the power descent.
But because we had such a low parallel, we activated a laser
and found the problem. So that was fortunate and that
was a bit of luck for us that then we identified that they
weren't firing. So at that point then that was
recovered. Like I said, at the next morning
we uncovered that and then we had to work feverishly to figure
out an alternative solution. Anything there Tim?
Yeah. Just the second part, Irene, to
your question of when would they normally have come on.
Normally we would have turned them on after deorbit insertion
about an hour before landing. And we expected the, what we
call the terrain relative navigation LIDAR, their laser
range Finder that would have operated really from about 50
kilometers altitude all the way down to landing.
And then after pitch over, we had a laser on the other side
that would take us from a kilometer down.
So we would have probably been 5 minutes to landing before we
would have realized that those lasers weren't working if we had
not had that fortuitous event. So serendipity is absolutely the
right word. Jackie Waddles, CNN.
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for doing this.
Had a quick question for Steve or Tim.
I know everyone's really curious about the photos here.
So do you guys have any indication of Eagle Cam is in a
position to pop off the Lander and take some pictures?
And to that end, if you could just clarify for all of us, are
there any specific payloads whether commercial or NASA?
I know some of them are passive and you're still working on
figure out these data down links and stuff, but are there any
that you know for sure or just haven't gotten any data yet and
don't know if you will get data from?
Thanks so much. Well, fortunately again Eagle
Cam sits on a panel. Let me show Tim if panel EI
believe is towards the surface of the moon.
Eagle Cam sits over here on this panel and we plan to eject that
camera off the side, so it will fall about 30 meters or so, then
maybe not that far away from the Lander and get a good shot of
the Lander position this way. So we're looking to power up
that Eagle Cam. We were waiting on getting
commanding ability power that up, clear that SD card and fire
the camera and so we can get a A view a back to our Lander.
So that's a very exciting image for us.
The reason it wasn't fired as we were landing was because of this
NAV system initialization that we had to do which put a flag up
to flag the Eagle Cam not to fire.
So that was part of the troubleshooting we had to do to
to get the Doppler LIDAR into the NAV system.
We had to do these navigation initializations and that shut
off the Eagle Cam and we knew that was in the software, but we
just did not have time to go fix that.
And so now we'll get it and get the image in the orientation
that we need. The other question you had about
commercial payloads, we think we can meet all of the needs and
from the commercial payloads that we have in the orientation,
we have the one on Panel E that's covered right now or
shaded by the Lander and the surface is the Arc Cube project.
And we believe we've got an image of that already that we
can download and share with our our customer.
I'll add that for the NASA science payloads, as we said
earlier, the many of them have already taken a lot of data, a
lot of measurements in transit and also on descent.
We're still checking to see if in the current suspected
orientation of the vehicle whether there will be any
particular measurements that can't be made in some of the
payloads. So, for example, we want to make
sure that the laser retro reflectors, which are normally,
you know, pointed up so that when the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter flies over it can pulse them with a laser beam and find
their position. We'll have to check to make sure
that they can still be illuminated.
They probably can be when the orbiter's fault is flying it up
at a further angle away on the trajectory, very similar to what
we found with the recent slim landing from the Japanese Space
Exploration Agency. But we are doing an assessment
to see are there any measurements still to come that
from any of the NASA supply payloads that most likely can't
take place particularly because of this new orientation?
Great. Thank you so much for that.
Will Robinson Smith for Space Flight Space Flight now.
Will, Yes. Hi, thanks for taking the time
to answer our questions here. One for Joel and for Sun.
If I could, given the success and now the operability of the
NDL, will that become AI guess highly recommended or required
payload on future eclipse missions?
And what are the potential implications or or knock on
effect for the human landing system Landers?
Will NASA recommend that Blue Origin and SpaceX implement that
into their landing systems? Thanks.
I'll take a, I'll take a shot for Sun, but please please add.
So for a commercial lunar payload services initiative, we
don't prescribe to the company partners that are doing this as
a service, you know what techniques or technologies they
use. But as you can imagine all these
different companies are always looking for low risk, good
performance ways to gather the data or conduct the operations
that they are going to conduct for NASA.
So we I'm sure that the story as you can tell now is very public
about about things like the performance of the NDL.
And we would think that people that are looking at lunar
Landers would be checking into that technology.
Now that it's actually been flight proven operationally on
probably the an unanticipated flight test mission, right,
actually use it operationally. I would say the same thing.
You know, the human Lander system partners have their own
techniques and their own approaches that they're taking.
But again, now that this has been actually shown to
operationally work, I would think it's going to be of great
interest to folks that want to travel to the moon first time.
Yeah, I will add, you know, we've actually did.
NASA has already licensed this technology to a small company to
commercially provide this to whoever wants to buy it, right.
And so this only adds more validation of the system.
There's just a technical reason to add it right beyond the
aspects that Joel talked about because it is an order of
magnitude more accurate in precision and measurement of
range and velocity components. It's half the power, half the
mass of the traditional approaches that we've used in
the past and the volume in terms of signs is about 1/3 of it.
So if you just look at it from a technical perspective, it just
provides all these benefits. And so I'm sure future vendors
will look at this type of capability anew and and try to
incorporate these types of technologies.
And that's why we're doing these missions right, is to develop
better and better capable systems that allow us to do this
more reliably, more capably and hopefully more sustainably and
more cost efficient wise. So in fact, after the landing, I
did joke with Steve there, it's like, hey, now Are you ready for
I Am 2 because we have 3 payloads already ready to go on
I am two, right. And so we're ready to
demonstrate even more stuff that will help the greater space
economy that burgeoning in here in the US and and we just want
to augment that as much as possible we can with what we're
doing. Yeah, I'll chime in as well.
You know, as you look forward to future emissions and as we begin
delivering cargo emissions with a metric ton and more, you know
those those payloads get more and more valuable.
And as those payloads get more and more valuable, we're going
to have to prove to our customers that we have
robustness in our landing systems.
One of the ways you achieve robustness is with redundancy or
with the similar redundancy. So having two ways of measuring
that landing. We had a camera system on board,
but if you have a camera system and a laser system, one might
fail in a way that the other one might not.
And so I can see that as the lunar economy opens up, as NASA
begins to send cargo and larger, more expensive payloads with
companies like ours and others, that you're going to see demand
for these kind of sensors complementing a suite of sensors
that you use to guarantee safe landing is going to be something
that that will be an industry standard.
Thank you for that. We are going to try and take two
more questions. So I'm going to ask you guys to
be brief in your remarks so we can get the get through these
questions. First up, we have Marsha Smith
with spacepolicyonline.com. Marsha.
Thanks so much. Getting back to the
communications question, I gather that part of the
challenge is that you have so many different sites around the
world with different capabilities.
But I know that you would talk before you launched about the
challenges of communicating at the South Pole.
But how much of the calm problems are related to the
ground stations and how much to the place where you are on the
moon? And what lessons are you going
to learn from all of this for the Artemis missions?
Well, yeah, I'll answer some of that question.
What you get is a phenomenon at the South Pole that NASA is
interested in understanding since that's where our future
Artemis missions are targeted or NASA's future Artemis missions
are targeted is a is a frequency multi path condition and so are
you going to get multi path interference on your
communication frequencies? Fortunately we think the
antennas that are pointed towards the moon will give us a
really good understanding of that phenomenon at the South
Pole. Another serendipitous moment,
right? But I would say that we thought
about this landing on the South Pole quite a bit and if you look
at the mock of all the antennas are up high and pointed like we
like towards Earth. When you're sitting on on the
surface of the Moon in transit, it's very difficult.
You have to constantly change your attitude to point the
antennas back to Earth when you're headed to the Moon.
So we're going to figure out an antenna location map for
subsequent missions and even mission two that gives us an
antenna pointed back at the Earth when we're flying out
towards the towards the Moon for sure.
Also in this first ever use of our lunar data network, of this
commercially now available data network made-up of these large
radio astronomy dishes that we've stitched together in a
network. Some of those dishes have had
have had configuration issues. Some of those dishes have had a
weaker power band. So we can all operate on this
frequency S band set of frequencies.
However, the power to reach the moon is what came into account
as we went around and out towards the moon.
The further we got, the some of the times those power
transmission levels were too low to have us keep the carrier
locked, locked up on the radios. So that was some of the
challenges and that's what we're looking for going forward is to
really regularize that lunar data network so that
operationally we know the configuration we can go upgrade
to put additional orbit determination capabilities
within our baseband units at each antenna site.
And and the best thing will be when we get our data relay
satellites in orbit, we'll have that problem licked and we can
communicate short distance from the surface up to a satellite
and relay that back to Earth in a in a in a more traditional
way. So looking forward to those
advances in the communication system.
Thank you. And we have one last question we
can take this afternoon with Adam Mann from Science.
Adam. Hi there, I'm with Science News
actually and I guess this is for the Intuitive machines folks.
I'm wondering maybe you've answered this already, but I'm
just wondering if you have any idea how long OD might be able
to stay operational on lunar surface.
Well, it's a great question and and you're going to bring a tear
to my eye. We know at at this landing site
the sun will move beyond our solar arrays in any
configuration in approximately 9 days.
And so the early missions are all solar powered and require
that. And then once the sun sets on on
OD, the batteries will attempt to keep the vehicle warm and
alive, but eventually it'll fall into a deep cold.
And then the electronics that we produce just won't survive the
deep cold of lunar night. And so, best case scenario,
we're we're looking at another nine to 10 days.
And then we will, of course, the next time the sun illuminates
the solar arrays, we'll turn our dishes to the moon, just to see
if the radios and the batteries in the flight computer survive
that deep cold. The solar array should, they
should survive the deep cold and provide power, but we'll just
see if our electronics made it through.
We'll take a look, we'll take a listen.
By that time we'll have gotten very, very good at at listening
to that signal, but we do expect probably a maximum of another
nine to 10 days. Thank you so much, Tim, and
thank you to everyone who submitted questions this
afternoon. And thank you to our briefers
for taking the time to discuss this historic mission enabled by
the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services or Eclipse
Initiative. We hope you'll continue to
follow along on this mission by keeping track on Intuitive
Machines's website and on nasa.gov/CLPS that will wrap
today's briefing. Thank you so much.