'Odysseus' lander successfully touches down on the moon in historic landing

The robotic lunar lander known as Odysseus became the first-ever private spacecraft to soft-land on the moon Thursday. The difficult landing marked the first U.S. landing on the lunar surface since NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

The robotic lunar lander known as Odysseus is on the moon. The spacecraft landed on the moon's surface at 6:23 p.m. ET Thursday after experiencing unexpected issues.

It's unclear what state the lander is in, but Intuitive Machines, the company that built the spacecraft in cooperation with NASA, has confirmed it has made contact and acquired a signal. A couple of hours before landing, an apparent issue with Odysseus’ navigation systems forced it to use experimental technology to land.

“I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus announced on a live webcast. “Welcome to the moon.”

The difficult landing marked the first US moon landing since NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and the first-ever by a private company.

The Odysseus lander – also known by its nickname "Odie" – landed near a region of the moon called Malapert A, a small crater near the lunar south pole. Landing near the south pole offers almost constant sunlight, which can power a spacecraft's solar cells for longer. Some of the south pole's dark craters are believed to be home to water in the form of ice, Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, told NPR.

Before Odysseus descended to the lunar surface, the probe endured brutal temperature fluctuations as it made 12 complete laps around the moon, according to Intuitive Machines.

According to the company, "When the lander is on the sunward side of the (lunar) orbit, the sun heats on the lander on one side, but the Moon also bakes the other side of the spacecraft with reflected infrared radiation, so Odysseus is very warm. Then, the lander passes into the lunar shadow and the vehicle plunges into a deep cold regime and requires heater power drawn from batteries to keep the systems warm."

The spacecraft was built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines. It launched from Florida on Feb. 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is one of several that NASA has purchased from private companies as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Odysseus is expected to last about one week on the moon's surface and then end when the two-week-long lunar night begins because the spacecraft isn't expected to survive the harsh, cold lunar night.

"Intuitive Machines and its customers expect to conduct science investigations and technology demonstrations for approximately seven days before the lunar night sets on the south pole of the Moon, rendering Odysseus inoperable," Intuitive Machines wrote in its mission overview.

As part of an $118 million contract, the lunar lander is carrying NASA experiments that will study the environment around the lander and help create new technologies for future landings. Privately funded lunar missions from Israel and Japan have both crashed in recent years, and another NASA-backed mission from the company Astrobotic fell back to Earth in January after a fuel leak.

NASA hopes the CLPS program will launch a network of private suppliers that will allow the U.S. to land astronauts on the moon again. It wants commercial companies to scout out locations, land scientific instruments and rovers and pave the way for the future of human exploration in space. The space agency is targeting 2026 as the first crewed mission back to the surface.

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