IM-1 Odysseus lunar lander

[spacexplorer]

IM announces mission success. Some interesting numbers here - 144 hours of work, 350 MB data gathered.

https://investors.intuitivemachines.com/news-releases/news-release-details/intuitive-machines-historic-im-1-mission-success-american

To be precise, 144 hours of surface operations was a goal that OM-1 exceeded before it suspended operations.

In passing they mentioned “NASA’s $93B Artemis Campaign”
That’s a really big number

OM-1 Fraction of Artemis cost: 2%
Fraction of data from the Moon to date: 100%
(Yes, that is contrived.)

Remember, this is a note to investors.  If there is a place for the most upbeat perspective it is there, but IMO they have a great accomplishment to report.

How to loose all your customers even before you have customers:

after the successful February 22 soft landing on the south pole region of the Moon.

Lie to them, assuming they are completely stupid and completely unaware of what actually happened.

How to find new customers:
"Despite a very hard landing which almost destroyed our spacecraft, our engineers were able to save the mission by means of complex and smart workarounds, which ended up allowing us to receive data from all payloads, gathering 350 MB of data, even from payloads which were unable to accomplish all or part of their tasks, and even without any antenna directly pointing to Earth. "

This is how you earn the trust of your future customers.

[Comga]

Snip

Hopefully the lens cap will be off the LIDAR!

If that was supposed to be funny, it failed
If that was supposed to be snark, please keep it to yourself.
There was no “lens cap”
It was a complex laser safety arrangement where something had to be ADDED to allow it to fire in space.
Have you ever followed or written a laser safety plan for a class IV laser?
Nether have I but the ones we wrote, formalized, and followed for Class III lasers were onerous enough.
Jim described a discipline for how others have done this successfully, and I’m sure that IM will adopt it ir an equivalent and do a thorough scrub for other places where more discipline and other’s experience will help.

[Don2]

Pointing for deep space telecom is performed using ephemeris products for the spacecraft and ground station(s).
No one does or will use an "image of the Earth." for this activity.

The pointing limitation at great distances comes down to the pointing capabilities of the spacecraft and the ground station, not the ability to know where to point.

I'm talking about deep space optical communications, not radio systems. While the spacecraft is responsible for coarse pointing, the optical transmitter handles fine pointing. Beacon aided pointing is employed by the current demonstration on Psyche. The ground station emits a reference beam which the optical transmitter finds and then tracks. For longer distances in the future, beaconless pointing techniques have been considered, using star trackers and thermal earth imaging.

"The flight system tracks the beacon, and using spacecraft ephemeris and attitude information calculates the point ahead angle required for downlink "
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tglavich_dsoc.pdf?emrc=710136

Here is a paper titled "Acquisition tracking and pointing using Earth thermal images for deep space optical communications"
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1251611

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Steve Altemus interview on the CNBC Manifest Space podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/manifest-space-with-morgan-brennan/id1680523433?i=1000647715331

[Don2]

I have to give Intuitive Machines credit for trying a lot of new things. Instead of using DSN, they put together their own antenna network. That was probably a cost cutting move, and I'm not sure it worked out well for them. One thing that DSN is very good at is communicating with troubled spacecraft that have very weak signals. DSN is also good at navigating spacecraft, and Intuitive had trouble with that too.

They seem to have a new and interesting way to manage the fuel and oxidizer involving high pressure composite tanks. The drawback of that is that the tanks might be heavy. The launch mass of IM-1 was 1900 kg with a 100 kg payload. The launch mass of Astrobotic's Peregrine was 1283 kg, with an initial 90 kg payload which they plan to uprate to 265 kg. I'm really not seeing the benefit of methalox here.

For science missions like drilling or deploying a rover, they will have to land the right way up. There is a lot to improve on the second flight.

[edzieba]

How to loose all your customers even before you have customers

Their customers have all publicly expressed that they are happy with the data they have received from their payloads delivered to the surface of the moon, and most have payloads on future IM landers.

[nzguy]

I have to give Intuitive Machines credit for trying a lot of new things. Instead of using DSN, they put together their own antenna network. That was probably a cost cutting move, and I'm not sure it worked out well for them. One thing that DSN is very good at is communicating with troubled spacecraft that have very weak signals. DSN is also good at navigating spacecraft, and Intuitive had trouble with that too.

I think the main issue they had is trying to combine a bunch of independent ground stations all with very different capabilities.

Hopefully this situation will improve. There are lots of commercial dish networks for working in Earth orbit, hopefully some of these might see opportunities to build bigger antennas for all the lunar missions. This would then allow global coverage through a single operator.

DSN is going to be very busy if all the commercial lunar missions end up using them all the time. DSN needs to ensure it can continue to support all the deep space and planetary missions going on.

[spacexplorer]

So what hapened to announced release of Eaglecam?

[LouScheffer]

The current pointing system won't work for Uranus. I'm not sure about Saturn. One issue is that it takes a long time for light to make the trip and the Earth moves in its orbit, so they have to point ahead of the earth. Using an image of the Earth might work for pointing at Uranus, but that likely has it's own challenges.

Pointing for deep space telecom is performed using ephemeris products for the spacecraft and ground station(s).
No one does or will use an "image of the Earth." for this activity.

The pointing limitation at great distances comes down to the pointing capabilities of the spacecraft and the ground station, not the ability to know where to point.

The current optical comms on Psyche does not use an image of the Earth, but it does use a strong uplink laser to decide where to point, as the spacecraft can't point accurately enough.  So the spacecraft points the telescope in the general direction, then uses the uplink (not an image of Earth) for the detailed pointing.

"The tech demo achieved “first light” in the early hours of Nov. 14 after its flight laser transceiver – a cutting-edge instrument aboard Psyche capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals – locked onto a powerful uplink laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California. The uplink beacon helped the transceiver aim its downlink laser back to Palomar (which is 100 miles, or 130 kilometers, south of Table Mountain) while automated systems on the transceiver and ground stations fine-tuned its pointing."

This particular "use the uplink to know where to aim the downlink" does not extend to outer planets well.  There are folks working on blind pointing for optical, like we do for radio now, but this needs extremely good spacecraft attitude info, optical alignment, and stability.

[spacexplorer]

Found something mysterious about Eaglecam: deployed but failed?

were able to eject it, and (we) ejected it about 4 meters away from the vehicle safely. However, either in camera or in the Wi-Fi signal back to the lander, something might not be working correctly

https://news.erau.edu/headlines/eaglecam-updates-embry-riddle-device-lands-on-moon

[LouScheffer]

There are two very different ways of looking at this mission, and we see both of them here.

One is "Hey, it basically worked, with some problems.  Fix those bugs and next time should be OK".

The other is  to point out that ""Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.” Space flight is less forgiving still."  There were definitely instances of carelessness and neglect on this mission.  It was able to overcome them, at least to some extent, this particular time, but this seems like beginner's luck and a bad recipe for future success.

Depending on which view you emphasize, you can see the glass as 9/10 full or 9/10 empty.  My personal view is that they got awfully lucky.  We'll know a lot more after the next mission.

[ulm_atms]

There are two very different ways of looking at this mission, and we see both of them here.

One is "Hey, it basically worked, with some problems.  Fix those bugs and next time should be OK".

The other is  to point out that ""Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.” Space flight is less forgiving still."  There were definitely instances of carelessness and neglect on this mission.  It was able to overcome them, at least to some extent, this particular time, but this seems like beginner's luck and a bad recipe for future success.

Depending on which view you emphasize, you can see the glass as 9/10 full or 9/10 empty.  My personal view is that they got awfully lucky.  We'll know a lot more after the next mission.

Except sometimes carelessness and neglect can also be wholly attributed to budget constraints.  Not trying to paint everything with a single brush, but everything is not black/white.  Gray is most of it. 

But like all things, A LOT more can be talked about/inferred on the second try.  Same mistakes/problems again?....I will stand by any "carelessness and neglect" comment at that point.  IM-1 was the learning lander(and from the pressers...they truly seemed to learn a lot).  IM-2 would, to me, be the operational one.  Time will tell and I can't wait!!!  So much more exciting times ahead for all space fans! 

[brussell]

In passing they mentioned “NASA’s $93B Artemis Campaign”
That’s a really big number

OM-1 Fraction of Artemis cost: 2%
Fraction of data from the Moon to date: 100%
(Yes, that is contrived.)

Do you mean IM-1? Shouldn't that be 0.12% ?

[Perchlorate]

In passing they mentioned “NASA’s $93B Artemis Campaign”
That’s a really big number

OM-1 Fraction of Artemis cost: 2%
Fraction of data from the Moon to date: 100%
(Yes, that is contrived.)

Do you mean IM-1? Shouldn't that be 0.12% ?

Or 0.27%, if you divide IM-1's $248 million cost to date (including IM's own portion) by the $93 billion for Artemis.
But who's splitting hairs?  It's a bargain, and a good sign for things to come, no matter what gradation of "partial success" anyone assigns to IM-1...IMO, anyway.

[theinternetftw]

Steve Altemus interview on the CNBC Manifest Space podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/manifest-space-with-morgan-brennan/id1680523433?i=1000647715331

Notes on the above post mission interview below.



Data brought back
  - have all data back for science payloads, both commercial and NASA
  - have all vehicle performance data, with pictures

Landing
  - suggests 12 degree slope played a significant part in losing the landing gear

Assessing the data
  - will take next 30 days to reconstruct mission using the data brought back
  - then improvements and design changes will be determined

Initial assessment
  - prop system performed better than anticipated
  - flight control (sans altimeter) worked perfectly
  - helium RCS regulators got too cold at certain in-transit attitudes necessary for antenna pointing
    - those started to seep helium
    - solution is to make sure they get more sun
  - ground stations
    - some issues with configuration agreement between stations
    - other problems with the IM baseband units added to those receivers
    - had some spotty communication at times
    - one of the biggest items
  - landing gear
    - handled a landing harder than it was designed for better than expected
    - expects the solution for the broken leg is a softer landing, "but we'll assess that."

Timeline for IM-2
  - more important to land softly than land sooner
  - will set a launch date once they're certain the vehicle's right

Surviving lunar night
  - never planned to wake back up when designing mission
  - do have plan to survive lunar night, but that was for future missions
  - still, worth a shot - set the lander to get ready for commands should it wake up
  - if it wakes, that will be amazing data on the batteries and flight computer
  - expects long term the key is RTGs - has nuclear energy partner (zeno power)
    - that project is "always 30 months away"

Medium term
  - three missions planned
  - expect late 2024, early 2025
  - need to do the mission review first
  - will fly Nova C lander at least three times
  - then Nova D, a lot more cargo, maybe a metric ton to the surface

Potential customers showing interest
  - governments showing interest
    - japan, australia, and 'some european and middle eastern countries'
  - sponsorship interest, 'people who want to put their name in the history books on the moon'
  - columbia
    - IM will replace some materials currently used on lander with the columbia thermal insulator flown on IM-1

Payload feedback from customers
  - NASA thrilled to have LN-1, NDL, RFMG at TRL 9.
  - EagleCam did deploy, but didn't get an image back

[Steven Pietrobon]

expects long term the key is RTGs - has nuclear energy partner (zeno power)

You don't need an RTG to survive the Lunar night. A less expensive RHU (radiosotope heating unit) like that used on the Apollo 11 seismometer and Lunakhod rovers is sufficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit

[Phil Stooke]

" IM-1's $248 million cost to date (including IM's own portion)"

I don't think this is a good figure.  It is the sum of two numbers we have been given: NASA paid $118M (assuming they gave full payment for the delivery) and IM spent $130M.  But the $130M would most likely include most of what NASA paid in installments prior to launch.  You can't just add the numbers together.

[Phil Stooke]

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/clps/nasa-collects-first-surface-science-in-decades-via-commercial-moon-mission/

This summary of the results from NASA's instruments on IM-1 includes this tantalizing statement:

 "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."

With any luck we will get something useful from these cameras.  If they are not released earlier they will be in PDS eventually.

[Blackstar]

" IM-1's $248 million cost to date (including IM's own portion)"

I don't think this is a good figure.  It is the sum of two numbers we have been given: NASA paid $118M (assuming they gave full payment for the delivery) and IM spent $130M.  But the $130M would most likely include most of what NASA paid in installments prior to launch.  You can't just add the numbers together.

I believe that NASA may also have provided services, such as thermal/vac testing, without cost.

[theinternetftw]

expects long term the key is RTGs - has nuclear energy partner (zeno power)

You don't need an RTG to survive the Lunar night. A less expensive RHU (radiosotope heating unit) like that used on the Apollo 11 seismometer and Lunakhod rovers is sufficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit

I expect he said RTGs because that's what they have a contract to help support:

https://investors.intuitivemachines.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nasa-selects-intuitive-machines-team-develop-survive-lunar-night