After an eight-day journey through space, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission is ready to attempt a potentially historic landing on the surface of the Moon. Odysseus will try for a lunar touchdown on Thursday at 9:49 am near the Malapert A crater in the Moon’s South Pole region.
Intuitive Machines will host a live stream of the landing on its website, and NASA will also air its own live coverage through the space agency’s website and NASA TV. You can also tune in through the stream below. The live coverage has begun and NASA will host a news conference afterwards.
Things are looking good so far for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C class lander, which entered lunar orbit on Wednesday following a series of trajectory correction maneuvers and a nearly seven-minute main engine burn, the company announced. With the lander now in orbit around the Moon, mission controllers will continue to analyze flight data ahead of the touchdown attempt and receive imagery beamed back by Odysseus.
The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to have a constant flow of landers headed to the Moon to deliver government-owned and commercial payloads. Odysseus is packed with 12 payloads, six of which are science and technology instruments for NASA.
With Thursday’s landing attempt, Intuitive Machines is hoping to become the first company to pull off a successful touchdown on the lunar surface, following a series of unfortunate anomalies that took down other recent missions. In January, Astrobotic failed in its attempt to reach the Moon due to a valve issue with its spacecraft. In April 2023, Japan’s ispace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the lunar surface, and Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet lander met a similar fate in April 2019.
If Odysseus lands successfully, it is designed to operate for about a week on the surface, until the Sun sets on the south polar region of the Moon.