Intuitive Machines is a private spaceflight company. The IM-1 mission has been contracted by NASA under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to build and fly a lander to the surface of the moon.
For a successful mission the Nova-C lander needs to soft-land on the moon such that the landing does not interfere with the function of the payloads, and the mission timeline is not cut by more than 50%. IM-1 is followed by IM-2 and IM-3.
/Sailfish/will-intuitive-machines-im2-mission
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IM-1 landed at February 22, 2024, 23:23:00 UTC, the mission is planned to continue until lunar night. The payloads that need to be confirmed to be functional for a YES resolution are:
[ \ ] ROLSES: Radio Observations of the Lunar Surface Photoelectron Sheath
[ \ ] LRA: Laser Retro-Reflector Array
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[ \ ] NDL: Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing
[ ] SCALPSS: Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies
[ \ ] LN-1: Lunar Node 1 Navigation Demonstrator
[ \ ] RFMG: Radio Frequency Mass Gauge statement
[ ] ILO-X: International Lunar Observatory Assosciation
[ ] = Not confirmed to be functional
[ \ ] = Claimed to be functional
[ X ] = Mission requirements have been confirmed to be completed
Odysseus has lost power, and so for the purposes of this market the mission is over. SCALPSS was intented to collect plume data during the IM-1 landing, it depends on altimetry data to trigger and collect data. There was no altimetry data due to a hardware failure on the lander during the landing, which prevented SCALPSS from collecting the data it was intended to, and so this resolves "No". This was an incredibly impressive effort from Intuitive Machines, especially considering all of the issues they had along the way, and they are well within their rights to consider the mission a success, but it did not meet the criteria of this market. They'll be flying many more lunar landing missions, and I hope to be able to resolve the markets for IM-2 and IM-3 "Yes".
@Sailfish I would argue for this that describing payloads as "functional" does not mean the same as completing mission objectives.
According to NASA, "The bottom line is every NASA instrument has met some level of their objectives, and we are very excited about that".
This should be changed to yes in my opinion.
@MinecraftAddict In addition, here's what they said about SCALPSS:
"The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies was powered on and captured images during transit and several days after landing but was not successfully commanded to capture images of the lander rocket plume interaction with the lunar surface during landing."
SSCALPS did in fact power on after landing and was functional, even if mission objectives were not met.
@MinecraftAddict Late reply, but I am very distrusting of everything Nasa and IM are saying, especially after (1) NASA tweeted out a pre-taped congratulations video immediately indicating the mission was a success and (2) IM stated point blank that the vehicle was upright. It was not, in fact, upright. It seems they were both very, very biased to saying that this was a huge success instead of just being honest and forthright about things. All of which is to say that if they're describing XYZ as "functional", I'd want to see data before accepting that as a fact.
There is a discussion of how the payloads are doing at 24:55 of this NASA news conference from today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2n2-_hLPM
EDIT: at 58:56, Sue Lederer says that SCALPSS was not able to collect data during the landing due to a hardware failure.
@hipparcos is this a hardware failure of the payload itself, or of IM-1? If of the payload, how does that impact question resolution?
@Morgan 29:02 in the video: "We unfortunately had some hardware problems that did not allow the SCALPSS instrument to operate during recent..." (though they were later able to operate SCALPSS from the surface of the moon?)
58:56 in the video: "...you are correct that because we were unable to collect data on the way down, we know that there was a hardware failure that we fixed in the serial port after we were on the surface. We also didn't trigger in order to - even that had been working we didn't have the triggers that were available that were necessary to collect that data on the way down is my understanding. So we were not able to collect the data for the plume [?] surface images that SCALPSS was to take."
I don't know enough to tell.
@quantizor That is using a different definition of success to that which was stated in the description and comments by sailfish, so isn't valid
@JosephBarnes Article by Eric Berger, who is by a good distance the most knowledgeable space journalist out there
@JosephBarnes "As a result, the Intuitive Machines team expects to receive good data from five of the six NASA payloads on board. Only the Stereo Cameras for the Lunar Plume-Surface Studies experiment, intended to capture the effects of the lander’s engine plume as it interacted with the lunar surface, are not responding. Altemus said he believes this payload was damaged during the landing process:
@Isaac228c I'd say that's a No, cos even without the damaged stereo cameras, its lack of solar power would "interfere with the function of the payloads".
@JosephBarnes Yeah, this is pretty clear cut. I'm going to wait until Odysseus actually dies to resolve since they've already found missing telemetry once this mission, and I prefer not to rush resolution, but that's fairly unambiguous.
@Gugra If you check the history, "such that the landing does not interfere with the function of the payloads, and the mission timeline is not cut by more than 50%" has been there since Jan 26. The extended section added after the landing is just tracking that existing criterion in greater detail.
@Gugra They've been present since the beginning, you can see the discussion below. The description as of September 10th, when this market was created.
For a successful mission the Nova-C lander needs to soft-land on the moon, and the payloads on the lander need to be operational.
I'm comfortable with saying that not tipping over is a moon lander core competency, so if this ends up resolving NO, I won't feel that I've made a mistake. I would prefer to clarify resolution criteria more exactly as time goes on, so everyone is aware of what they're betting on, but unfortunately Intuitive Machines hasn't released much useful information. I understand that other markets about space landers on manifold have different resolution criteria, and in many cases these resolution criteria do better match the mission profile. SLIM, for example, was mostly a proof of concept for new landing sensors, in that case, it does make sense to call the landing a "success", even though it fell over. This is why I re-clarified the resolution criteria before the landing. In this case, as I mentioned below, this is a commercial payload program, so a "success" in this case is delivering the payloads to the surface of the moon so that they can actually function as designed. If you prefer to bet only on whether or not the moon landers will send telemetry back from the moon, there is a good market with that resolution critera here.
Actually, I had forgotten I made this clarification already, from two months ago.
The intent is that they can't be damaged by a landing, and the lander can't land in such a way that they're not operational, e.g. it can't tip over and block some sensor or something.
It's tipped over, we're waiting to see if some sensor has been blocked. I've made a lot of these markets, so if you have any suggestions to make the resolution criteria more clear, I'd be happy to hear them. To maybe make it more clear why I didn't just add a "The lander can't tip over" criteria, it's because it generally can tip. Is five degrees too much? Thirty? Eighty seems like it's probably too much, but it might not be. If it lands facing the wrong way, it's either not a big deal, or a huge deal if it means it can't communicate or charge from the solar panels. You could just write "Everything has to work" as your resolution criteria, but if your criteria is so strict that it doesn't count any of the Apollo missions as successful, you've gone too far. I think asking whether or not the payloads the lander is contracted to deliver are functional is measuring the right thing, at least, although I'm not sure how to make resolution better defined in edge cases.