This will be the mission of 'Odysseus' on the Moon

Odysseus

, the Intuitive Machines lunar ship, has on board half a dozen instruments that, in one way or another, will prepare the future landing of astronauts.

NASA has decided to open the market to private companies: some dedicated to mere transportation, such as Space X, which provides the rocket or IM and specializes in landing modules, and others, to the construction of equipment that the agency traditionally designed.

On board

Odysseus

is a small reflector made of quartz prisms.

In the future it will serve as an aid to vehicles that land on the Moon.

It works like a radar: by reflecting laser beams on it and measuring the return and return time of the light, its distance can be precisely calculated.

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'Odysseus', the ship with which the US wants to return to the Moon half a century later, has been successfully launched

There are already other reflectors on the Moon, installed by the astronauts of the

Apollo

missions and the Russian

Lunokhod

vehicles .

They are quite large devices, suitable for making distance measurements from Earth.

The one being shipped now is much smaller, suitable only for relatively short distances.

Other equipment related to future lunar landings will be responsible for measuring height and descent speed with great precision using lidar (acronym for

Laser Imaging

Detection and Ranging), a type of echo sounder that uses light pulses instead of sound and that, naturally, on the Moon it would be of no use.

As it approaches the ground, the engine exhaust raises thick clouds of dust.

In some manned missions, the astronauts had to be guided by their shadow, since they could barely distinguish the details of the ground.

The

Odysseus

carries stereoscopic video cameras that will study the size and dynamics of the mineral fragments that accompany the landing.

The LN-1 experiment (from

Lunar Node

) is a radio beacon, the first of a network that will become a kind of selenite GPS.

Future vehicles (descent or

rovers

) may use it to maneuver autonomously.

Although that day still falls a little far away.

Finally, the

Odysseus

has a new system that uses radio waves to calibrate exactly how much fuel is left in its tanks.

It is not easy: in weightlessness the liquid floats forming large bubbles with no defined shape.

Before starting the engines, they must be primed by briefly firing the maneuvering engines to force the propellant to accumulate at the bottom.

And during landing, the vibrations cause a certain

surge

in the tanks so the pilots are never entirely sure how much time they have left.

Half a century ago, Armstrong landed with less than 30 seconds of fuel.

There is still room on board the

Odysseus

for six other private shipments.

One is a sample of insulating fabric intended for sports clothing.

Another, a video camera that should be ejected during the moon landing to document the maneuver from the outside.

And there are also some commemorative items, from microfiches with documents explaining what life on Earth is like to a sculpture by Jeff Koons, the same artist who created

Puppy

, the flower dog that adorns the entrance to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Koons claims that it is the first work of art to reach the Moon, but that is not exactly the case.

The

Apollo 12

astronauts already smuggled there a micro-gallery with minimalist works by six artists (Warhol and Myers among them) engraved on a ceramic tablet the size of a piece of gum.

And a couple of years later, the Dutchman Paul Van Hoeydonck took advantage of the

Apollo 15

flight to leave a copy of his

Fallen Astronaut

, in tribute to 14 deceased astronauts, both Russian and American.

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