Update: Odysseus on The Moon (and Its Payloads)

(The Moon) Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander touched down on the moon this evening – carrying a "treasure trove" of payloads – at 6.23pm EST, becoming the first U.S.-built spacecraft to accomplish a moon landing in 50 years (since Apollo 17 in 1972) and marking the first-ever moon landing by a private company.

An artist’s impression of the Odysseus lander on the surface of the moon courtesy of Intuitive Machines, via CBS News.

Odysseus ultimately landed near a crater known as Malapert A about 186 miles from the South Pole of the moon. The hexagonal-cylinder shaped Nova-C series lander is loaded with 12 payloads from NASA and commercial companies, which will carry out diverse science tasks on the surface of the moon, according to Space.com.

At 8:25pm this evening, Intuitive Machines posted via its X account, @Int_Machines, that flight controllers had confirmed that Odysseus was upright and starting to send data. The lander’s final descent was delayed by one orbit in order to press an experimental NASA navigation sensor into service and to test newly-written software patches to route its data to the lander’s flight computer, according to CBS News.

The Odysseus lander module, by Intuitive Machines, courtesy of SpaceX via CBS News.

A list of the 12 payloads onboard Odysseus is as follows, according to Space.com:

• Six NASA payloads, which flew on Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 commercial mission as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS) to aid the wider Artemis program of lunar exploration
• Six commercial payloads, including (1) Columbia Sportswear’s Omni-Heat thermal reflective technology, which will be tested on the lander’s A2 closeout panel to protect Nova-C’s cryogenic propulsion tank; (2) Embry-Riddle’s Eaglecam, a cubesat-sized payload designed to capture the first-ever ‘third-person’ image of a spacecraft making a lunar landing; (3) Jeffrey Koons’s ‘Moon Phases’ Art; (4) ILO-X’s dual-camera lunar imaging system and a precursor to the future International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) Hawaii flagship Moon South Pole Observatory, ILO-1, which will test and verify systems and conduct astronomy (including capturing images of the Milky Way); (5) Lunaprise’s time capsule containing “lunagram” messages etched on pure nickel nano fiche, which are designed to create a secure lunar repository to preserve human knowledge indefinitely as part of Arch Mission Foundation’s billion-year archive; and (6) Cloud computing startup Lonestar’s Independence payload, a lunar data center test mission for data storage and transmission from the lunar surface.

Jeff Koons: Moon Phases – each of the moon-bound sculptures represents a different phase of the moon, viewed from points on Earth and in space; Image credit: © Jeff Koons via wallpaper.com.

Rendering of Jeff Koons: Moon Phases; Image credit: © Jeff Koons via wallpaper.com.

More on Jeff Koons’ latest work, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases:

Koons’ work, which will be installed on the moon, comprises 125 miniature (one-inch) stainless-steel sculptures in a cubed array designed and built by 4Space in consultation with Koons, according to wallpaper.com. Each mini-moon represents a different phase of the moon as seen from various vantage points on Earth and in space, and each bears the name of a luminary, ranging from Plato to David Bowie via Helen Keller.

The sculptures will be paired with larger (15.5-inch) twins – and linked non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – that will remain on Earth and be made available through Pace Gallery’s Pace Verso, Koons’s partner for Web3 projects.