Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft experienced difficulties and was nearly lost due to a human error — a switch not turned off before launch. The mistake disabled lasers designed to guide the spacecraft to a level, safe landing point, according to Intuitive Machines co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus.
“It was a mistake on our part,” Altemus said.
«We wouldn’t have realized until five minutes before we landed that these lasers were not working if we hadn’t had this accidental event,” said Tim Crane, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, during the briefing.
As the mission operators prepared for the landing, they realized that the spacecraft was passing too close to the Moon’s south pole — the landing region. They thought they might need a greater distance to land properly. All they had to do was tell the spacecraft to move a little bit.
To verify the spacecraft’s location over the moon, the personnel tried to activate the laser rangefinders to check the surface — but the lasers would not turn on. The operations team began working in emergency mode and discovered that a safety physical switch designed for safety during ground testing was still on. This disabled the lasers.
Altemus recalled telling Crane that they would have to land the vehicle without the laser rangefinders: «His face went completely white because it was like being punched in the gut that we were going to lose the mission».
The extraordinary luck was that one of NASA’s six experiments aboard the lander was a test of the navigation system. The idea was to reprogram the lander’s navigation system to use the lasers from this experimental facility.
Controllers moved the spacecraft to a different orbit and delayed the landing by about 45 minutes — this allowed them to buy time to download a software patch that gave the lander new instructions.
“In the normal process of developing software for a spacecraft, this is something that would take a month. Our team did it in an hour and a half, and it worked. It was some of the best engineering I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with,” Crane said.
Source: Business Insider