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Mahesh

24/02/24 07:42 AM IST

First moon-landing by private company

In News
  • The lander module of Odysseus, called Nova-C, has become the second one, after Chandrayaan-3 last year, to land in the Moon’s south pole region.
About Odysseus
  • Odysseus, a spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines, a ten-year-old company based in Houston, used a Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX to take off from Earth on February 15.
  • The spacecraft carried six NASA payloads to the Moon.
  • The lander module of Odysseus, called Nova-C, has become the second one, after Chandrayaan-3 last year, to land in the Moon’s south pole region.
  • This is the third moon-landing event within a year, after Chandrayaan-3 and Japans’ SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon).
Aim of the mission
  • The landing of Odysseus marks a new beginning in the exploration of the Moon aimed at creating infrastructure and technology ecosystem capable of supporting long-term human presence.
  • This is very different from the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s by the US and the then Soviet Union, including the human landings by Apollo Missions.
  • The first moon landing, by Luna 9 of the Soviet Union, happened in 1966 just nine years after the beginning of the space age in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 that was the first spacecraft to reach an orbit around the Earth.
  • The first human landing on the Moon, through the Apollo 11 mission, took place just 12 years after the dawn of space age.
Artemis programme
  • The Artemis programme depends heavily on the support of private and commercial space agencies.
  • It has a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative through which NASA is working with such private companies to deliver equipment and technology to the Moon, and create a sustainable economy around lunar journeys.
  • This enables quicker sorties, technology dispersion, capacity building and larger pool of people working on lunar projects.
Significance
  • Odysseus is the first success of the CLPS initiative. NASA has already contracted 14 space companies for such missions.
  • At least six more lunar landings by these companies are scheduled by 2026, the year NASA plans to land the first human beings after the Apollo Missions, including one more from Intuitive Machines later this year.
Source- Indian Express

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