Quote from: NASAThe Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies was powered on and captured images during transit and several days after landing but was not successfully commanded to capture images of the lander rocket plume interaction with the lunar surface during landing.With any luck we will get something useful from these cameras. If they are not released earlier they will be in PDS eventually.
The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies was powered on and captured images during transit and several days after landing but was not successfully commanded to capture images of the lander rocket plume interaction with the lunar surface during landing.
Not commanded to capture plume interactions ... because ... the lander guidance believed it was still 100m above the lunar surface when in actuality it was about to make contact?
SCALPSS issue - a hardware failure in the serial port kept them from collecting data during descent - fixed that after landing - even if that hadn't happened, due to the flight computer not expecting landing at the altitude it happened, SCALPSS wouldn't have been triggered ("...is my understanding")
Quote from: DanClemmensen on 03/01/2024 12:47 pmQuote from: Blackstar on 03/01/2024 12:45 pmQuote from: spacexplorer on 03/01/2024 05:40 amWill the recent success of laser communication make the Big Dishes obsolete one day? Can laser be used to communicate with missions to external planets? How big should the ground based stuff be? There are reasons why lasercom probably won't work past Jupiter distance.What are those reasons?Pointing accuracy. But I don't know. You can google all this stuff. I have not heard a detailed DSN briefing in a few years.This article points about using laser comm at very far distances, but I believe I heard Ralph McNutt (mentioned in the article) say that it gets dicey around Jupiter distance.https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/12/07/interstellar-communications-the-pointing-problem/
Quote from: Blackstar on 03/01/2024 12:45 pmQuote from: spacexplorer on 03/01/2024 05:40 amWill the recent success of laser communication make the Big Dishes obsolete one day? Can laser be used to communicate with missions to external planets? How big should the ground based stuff be? There are reasons why lasercom probably won't work past Jupiter distance.What are those reasons?
Quote from: spacexplorer on 03/01/2024 05:40 amWill the recent success of laser communication make the Big Dishes obsolete one day? Can laser be used to communicate with missions to external planets? How big should the ground based stuff be? There are reasons why lasercom probably won't work past Jupiter distance.
Will the recent success of laser communication make the Big Dishes obsolete one day? Can laser be used to communicate with missions to external planets? How big should the ground based stuff be?
During the visit to Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said the spacecraft had been designed to stay upright when landing even on a slope of 10 degrees or more. The navigation software was programmed to look for a spot where the slope was five degrees or less.Because the laser instruments on Odysseus for measuring altitude were not working during descent, the spacecraft landed faster than planned on a 12-degree slope. That exceeded its design limits. Odysseus skidded along the surface, broke one of its six legs and tipped to its side.
Why It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.htmlQuote from: Kenneth ChangDuring the visit to Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said the spacecraft had been designed to stay upright when landing even on a slope of 10 degrees or more. The navigation software was programmed to look for a spot where the slope was five degrees or less.Because the laser instruments on Odysseus for measuring altitude were not working during descent, the spacecraft landed faster than planned on a 12-degree slope. That exceeded its design limits. Odysseus skidded along the surface, broke one of its six legs and tipped to its side.
Quote from: yg1968 on 03/05/2024 02:17 amWhy It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.htmlQuote from: Kenneth ChangDuring the visit to Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said the spacecraft had been designed to stay upright when landing even on a slope of 10 degrees or more. The navigation software was programmed to look for a spot where the slope was five degrees or less.Because the laser instruments on Odysseus for measuring altitude were not working during descent, the spacecraft landed faster than planned on a 12-degree slope. That exceeded its design limits. Odysseus skidded along the surface, broke one of its six legs and tipped to its side.Hmmm... Doesn't 12 degrees fall under "10 degrees or more"?Grumble grumble.
Quote from: meekGee on 03/05/2024 04:37 amQuote from: yg1968 on 03/05/2024 02:17 amWhy It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.htmlQuote from: Kenneth ChangDuring the visit to Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said the spacecraft had been designed to stay upright when landing even on a slope of 10 degrees or more. The navigation software was programmed to look for a spot where the slope was five degrees or less.Because the laser instruments on Odysseus for measuring altitude were not working during descent, the spacecraft landed faster than planned on a 12-degree slope. That exceeded its design limits. Odysseus skidded along the surface, broke one of its six legs and tipped to its side.Hmmm... Doesn't 12 degrees fall under "10 degrees or more"?Grumble grumble.Tsk, tsk. Have to take into account that Odysseus was supposed to landed with very little or zero horizontal velocity. The landing gear wasn't designed for a rolling helo landing.
Quote from: Zed_Noir on 03/05/2024 05:11 amQuote from: meekGee on 03/05/2024 04:37 amQuote from: yg1968 on 03/05/2024 02:17 amWhy It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.htmlQuote from: Kenneth ChangDuring the visit to Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer, said the spacecraft had been designed to stay upright when landing even on a slope of 10 degrees or more. The navigation software was programmed to look for a spot where the slope was five degrees or less.Because the laser instruments on Odysseus for measuring altitude were not working during descent, the spacecraft landed faster than planned on a 12-degree slope. That exceeded its design limits. Odysseus skidded along the surface, broke one of its six legs and tipped to its side.Hmmm... Doesn't 12 degrees fall under "10 degrees or more"?Grumble grumble.Tsk, tsk. Have to take into account that Odysseus was supposed to landed with very little or zero horizontal velocity. The landing gear wasn't designed for a rolling helo landing. Let me guess, designed to withstand 1 m/s or more?
https://mainenginecutoff.com/podcast/269QuoteT+269: IM-1 and Beyond (with Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines)MARCH 7, 2024Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines, joins me to talk about their recent IM-1 mission to land Odysseus on the Moon as part of NASA’s CLPS program.
T+269: IM-1 and Beyond (with Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines)MARCH 7, 2024Tim Crain, Co-Founder and CTO of Intuitive Machines, joins me to talk about their recent IM-1 mission to land Odysseus on the Moon as part of NASA’s CLPS program.
IM-1 MECO podcast 2024-03-07----------------------------IM-2 timing mentioned as "the end of the year."Hot wash [military term; an after action report] - Coming soon, week of the 18th. - Teams get together, present findings from mission data for their systems, give recommendations going forward. - Will have a panel to decide what goes into IM-2. - E.g. change the procedure for checking flight cables, "that's an easy one." - For some, will judge destabilizing IM-2 in leadup to launch not worth it, will put those into IM-3. - For even more disruptive changes, or things that need mass, put that into the Nova D project. - The fourth category is affectionately called "nah." - Well, maybe someday. Put those on the shelf. - Compares to Project Morpheus, where they went through this process after the first Morpheus lander failed. - Had the Bravo lander for Morpheus 60% complete. - Got the agency to accept the failure as the price of moving fast. - Did exactly the same process after that failure. - Had ~180 recommendations for changes to the Bravo vehicle. - Only implemented maybe 70 of those. - Don't want to change so much so fast that you lose the heritage of the mission you just performed.Schedule a concern? - Yes, because of lighting at Shackleton. - Most spots on the moon, you get 14 days of light, 14 of night. - But you have seasons at the poles. - Q4 of this year is a really good lighting period for a south pole mission. - Could move that into early 25 if they have to, but can't delay indefinitely. - At some point, you have to deal with it then being southern polar winter on the moon. - That would be a bad time for IM-2. - A significant risk for mission success would still win out over any schedule concerns, to be clear.What would you do today if Odysseus was teleported back here, ready to go again right now? - Physically, just the fix for the laser safety disable. - Everything else left as it was. - Non hardware changes? - Software mods. - Configuration management. - Some lessons learned with the ground stations. - Confident if you did those, the mission would be smooth. - Things that worked, just not as expected first time around can be adjusted for on IM-2.IM-2 physical progress - Have all the materials. - Already stacked the tanks. - Structural components are done. - Have the avionics. - Mostly assembly right now. - A few things here and there. - Another pressure transducer here. - A larger heater near this RCS pod; it got cold on IM-1. - Relatively small changes.IM-2 payloads - Integrated the lunar outpost rover / Nokia 4G LTE experiment into their flatsat testing of the lander. - Built the garage and deployment mechanism for the rover, "garage comes down and pivots as it lands." - Hopper is ready for flight "with just a couple mods." - Been through thermal vac testing. - PRIME-1 drill still needs to be mounted to final location. - "All the pieces are here."Antenna pointing on the way out requiring more RCS than expected - 100s of hours of operational training pre-launch. - Examples of things that slipped through that training: - From ground station to ground station, misconfiguration issues. - E.g. causing what was expected to be a smooth handover to be a 45m gap. - On a 7 day cruise to the moon, a 45m gap is not necessarily a big deal. - But recovery logic in the comms system made it power cycle after 15m of signal loss. - And if that doesn't reestablish comms, switch to other hemi antenna. - So there was a period of the vehicle trying to reestablish comms by switching antennas. - Took awhile to understand everything that was going on there. - In the first few days of the mission, may have "over-responded." - The vehicle is using a new antenna now? Use RCS to point it to earth. - After those few days, understood the problem. - At that point, used less helium, mitigated those comm dropouts. Everything got smoother. - First three days definitely had a learning curve.South pole as a comms environment - Definitely worried about multipath signal propagation, especially for IM-2 which is even more south than IM-1. - When you're very close to the south pole, the Earth is on the horizon. - That means the signal will be more likely to interact with the lunar surface. - IM-1 hadn't had as much prep for that, because it was originally going to be a mid latitude mission. - IM-2 was in work, though, so they had been working on south pole prep anyway. - Tilted solar array, changed thermal coatings. - Landing on its side caused all lander transmissions to bounce off the moon. - That's why it took a few days after landing to get a grip on receiving lander data. - Had to account for polarization changes to get data back. - IM-2 antenna is phased array and also has articulation. - Should help manage multipath physically.IM-1 vs IM-2 - IM-1 was "as stripped down as we could make it", "lean, lean, lean" - IM-2 has more features. - Better cameras. - Linear phased array high gain can follow Earth as it moves in the sky. - Can also use that to experiment with multipath. - E.g. it might be better to aim a little above the Earth to avoid lunar surface interactions.Getting into lunar orbit - Why no TCM-3? - Later maneuvers cost more, less time to determine new orbit and less time to fix errors. - Early maneuvers have higher error propagation concerns. - Waived TCM-2, kept what was on the books as TCM-3 (now the 2nd maneuver) - Did Commissioning Maneuver (CM) early, 20 m/s - Planned to be that much regardless of corrections needed, in order to exercise engine across desired profile. - Took them from a 2000 km flyby to 3000 km on other side of the "B plane." So added more energy than needed. - TCM-1 took them from 3000 km flyby to 350-400 km. Closer to where they wanted to be. - Thought after TCM-3 they were at a 100-130 km closest approach. Orbit determination said 120 km. - Orbit determination at this distance is an art. Based on range/doppler data from one station at a time. No GPS. - Thought they were in the corridor needed. Making more changes this late might introduce error the size of the desired correction. - Post-LOI onboard indications were 95 km x 85 km orbit. - This is all current thinking before all the received data is analyzed in the coming weeks. It may change. - Three things at work for getting in the orbit they ended up in - Error ellipse of orbit determination process. They were looking at the mean, but ended up on the low side. - Had an overburn - Tailoff after engine cutoff that still generated thrust. - Can compensate for that in maneuver planning on future missions. - 850 m/s LOI, overburned by 2.5 m/s. - Happy with that performance. - But for example, the LDI burn to go from 100 km circular to 100 km by 10 km is 15 m/s. - So an overburn of that size in a braking maneuver is significant. - Then add in mascons - lumpy mass concentrations around the moon that move your apolune and perilune around in LLO. - Team looking at burn performance was happy at the time, thought they were in a good orbit. - Team looking at imagery was saying, hey, these images look a little closer than they should be. - Team doing the orbital determination agreed. - There are two pods of navigation equipment; one on each side of the lander - The Terrian Relative Navigation side could range find out to 80 km. - Could turn on that TRN pod, and if it got returns, that's a confirmation that the altitude is less than 80 km. - It'd be a good bit of data to have. - However, the pod got no returns. - So do you say, whelp, looks like our altitude's fine, the laser isn't returning any measurements? - Or is the laser not firing and on top of that you're *still* low? - And if it's not firing, why? Is there a procedure order mistake? Etc.? - Got people working in a back room on that. - While that was happening, image team gave more confirmation of lower orbit than desired. - That lower orbit could be made worse by mascons as time passes and you fly over them. - Have a lot of gravity data about the moon, and that's integrated into the Copernicus trajectory planner. - Some of that data suggested their perilune might raise itself over time, but they didn't want to take the chance that was wrong. - Had some lunar correction maneuver capability built into the mission, more thinking about early burn shutoff than the alternative. - And so, worried they might be even lower, they raised the orbit back up. - "Would have to look at the data", but think they ended up 180 km x 20 km.Fun with orbital mechanics - When they first got to the moon, had a 2 hr period, exactly as desired. - So some assurances came from LOS / AOS happening when expected. - However, the period timing is determined solely by the semi-major axis. - So a 100 km x 100 km orbit has the same period as a 150 km x 50 km orbit.Lunar Correction Maneuver (LCM) burn - Went like clockwork - Team went from having to figure out in-space thermal timing for ox/meth feedlines in CM/TCM-1 (and having to abort those burns the first time around), to dialing in valve and timing settings, which got all further burns occurring exactly on time, including the TCM. - Didn't need a software reload for the LCM burn, it was a pre-planned contingencyWhy was the accidental low perilune just where you needed it to be able to slot into something resembling the descent orbit after LCM? - LOI was done over the north pole. - From Earth, lander went out to the lunar radius and waited for the moon to catch up - If you were on Odie at the time, you'd see the moon coming "straight at you, like the Death Star." - But if you look at it from the lunar reference frame, the lander is dropping in from over the lunar north pole - So it worked out that an overburn would result in a more southerly perilune. - It wasn't *exactly* where they wanted it, but they adjusted it - just did a non ideal burn that moved things around the way they needed. - [NOTE: Tim Crain was still talking about 100x80 orbits here as if they were in an orbit like that before the LCM burn - It may be that the "we raised the perilune" line from press conferences is confused, misunderstood or was based on old data - it doesn't sound to me like he's saying they raised perilune to 20 km, and he may not have understood that Anthony was implying that in this question; whether the pre-LCM-burn perilune was below 20 km remains unclear to me having listened to this.] - Tim Crain was mentored by Emil Schiesser, a mathematician who played a significant role in orbit planning and determination for Apollo. - On the day before Neil Armstrong retired from NASA in 1971, journalist Robert Sherrod asked him who on the Apollo team stood out in the astronaut’s mind in terms of talent and ability. Armstrong grinned and said, "Emil Schiesser! I’d vote for Emil every time." - Schiesser relayed that the Apollo missions had a very simplistic approach to their orbits early on, but in later missions began to bias those orbits to come in more elliptical over the landing site. Which they did as they became more comfortable and had more proficiency with what the CSM and LM could do. Some of those performance savings they got from injecting into something closer to their pre-landing orbit were used to afford the mass of the lunar rovers included on later vehicles. - They'll be looking at what to do in the future for insertion based on their experience with IM-1.Exact numbers - There are going to be papers that they're going to present at conferences and in journals over the next year. - Probably 20 or 30; he wants the teams to tell their story. - Trying to walk a line between transparency and quoting things that then change as they continue to look at the data. - So the information will come out, just probably not in a podcast.What if they hadn't fired up the lasers due to the overburn? - Thinks the result would have been the same. - Would have been some amount of panic once they reached 15 km and the lasers didn't come online. - But since they didn't manage the NDL miracle hack, the sensors available would have been the same.Making your own comms network - Aside: when CLPS came out, IM was a company of about 30 people. [Currently ~250, iirc]. - The CLPS program specified to not count on the DSN as a communications asset. - IM "maybe read a little bit more into that" than intended. - What CLPS really meant was that you need to engage with NASA, get a Space Act agreement, go through the gauntlet of getting DSN time. - It wasn't a mandate not to use it. - But they also said that if there's a spacecraft emergency, you may not have priority depending on what else is happening with other assets. - Add to that the fact that IM knows DSN is oversubscribed already. - So they put together a partnership with KSAT (Kongsberg Satellite Services) out to half-lunar distance. - Then started to talk to radio astronomy sites to get the rest of the way. - Deployed IM's own baseband units to those sites. - So e.g. at the Parkes dish in Australia is an IM avionics/radio box plugged into their dish. - Had a Space Act agreement with NASA to do tracking of LRO (tx a signal, got it back) so IM could test infrastructure, baseband units. - Also did one way tracking of Artemis. (just listened) - Great praise for the international team they worked with. Parkes Australia, Okinawa, Cornwall, Hartebeesthoek.Relay network around the moon - IM will still need large ground stations for a 'trunk line' to the moon to get data from that relay network once it's there. - Landers using the network will be able to use GEO-distance radios that are ubiquitously available, not need to e.g. devote mass to a 2m dish for high bandwidth. - In the future, could see laser comms back to Earth. That would be Gb/s. - People have talked about sending laser comms to MEO assets which then use RF to communicate with ground. Avoid optical atmospheric problems (clouds). - Sees a cell phone style usage model for their lunar comms network. "Roaming charges."Commercial customers - Very important to have a cadence of missions - Customers will come to you with a date that they'll be ready. - Very valuable to be able to have a mission you're already flying that fits that bill.Nova D - Really want to migrate to this lander - 500 kg to surface, can still launch on a Falcon 9. - ~3.5x more payload, not 3.5x more expensive to fly. - At that point, can talk about dropping the price to fly to the lunar surface. - (current prices for CLPS landers: ~$800,000 to $1,000,000 / kg to surface.)Comms at a public space company - Most public aerospace companies have massive legal, public affairs departments. - Public affairs at IM: a staff of 3. - Very tough to transparently share info in real time when you know that if you wait, you might get better / different info. - That introduced tension.
IM-1 Mission Recap and Farewell Speech
Mar 15, 2024Our official IM-1 mission ended on February 29th, as Odie was not designed to survive the moon’s harsh temperatures without sunlight. While we wait for the possibility of hearing from Odie once the sun shines on the solar panels prior to the end of the month, watch our mission recap below, which includes a heartfelt farewell from Mission Director @astro2fish, commemorating the lander's groundbreaking voyage and the wealth of knowledge delivered from the lunar surface.
