By Eshaan Joshi
The Odysseus Rover, one of the first successful American moon missions in decades, has shut down after several complications in the descent and landing stages made it impossible for the rover to function.
Odysseus landed successfully on Feb. 22, the culmination of several years, several failed launches, and various developments in space travel. The rover is the first of its kind — fully commercial and built at the behest of NASA as part of their programs to incentivize private companies to develop space infrastructure. While operational on landing, the rover had a few major issues in the beginning, starting with its orientation: The rover was on its side. One of its six feet caught onto the surface during landing, causing the rover to tumble and tip over.
This project already had one major flaw, something that’s a part of various moon missions and weighed in on the calculations. Due to the cold, the heat drop, and the way technology responds to the lunar weather and storms, many rovers shut down after a few days as they lose solar power and are forced to hibernate.
The Odysseus team had taken this into account, and the rover was expected to last a week before the night set in and it lost power. However, with the way the solar panels were now angled, the angle of incident from the sun, and the collateral damage taken from the off-center landing, Odysseus was expected to die early.
There were a few other problems. First, with a twisted antennae, Odysseus was also not expected to be able to fully communicate with Earth. While ground control was able to get a significant amount of data from the probe, much of which will be invaluable for later missions, there were definitely hurdles in how much data, and the quality, was able to be received.
As it stands, Odysseus had been programmed to send some sort of “I’m awake” message should it manage to survive the lunar night, but no such update has arrived.
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