Odysseus imaged from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

"Odysseus came to rest at 80.13°S, 1.44°E, 2579 m elevation, within a degraded one-kilometer diameter crater where the local terrain is sloped at a sporty 12°.

https://www.lroc.asu.edu/posts/1360

These have the advantage that they can hover in an actively controlled vertical attitude, as demonstated in at least one Starship test flight, until there is no more horizontal motion. Not much, or rather nothing, has been published on the internet yet regarding the landing legs of these vehicles. But I can imagine that they have the capability to extend differently in order to cater for uneven or sloping ground.

What Next:

"These have the advantage that they can hover in an actively controlled vertical attitude, as demonstrated in at least one Starship test flight, until there is no more horizontal motion."

..I'm sure that's part of the theory, and I know it's been demonstrated, but of course according to the IM CEO a day or two back the intention with Odysseus was to touch down with zero horizontal motion....

One reason the likes of Surveyor's landing gear was as wide rigged as it was was because at the early design stage nobody had much of a clue about lunar topography on a micro scale (that started to come with the late Ranger missions) , and with the onboard technology available at the time the amount of horizontal motion remaining on touchdown couldn't be guaranteed to be zero...so the gear was built to allow the thing to land on a sizeable slope with some residual horizontal motion.

I'm probably way wide of the mark here so please allow a bit of idle speculation but I wonder if some of the current thinking is that with all the modern super reliable "tech" there's no need expended weight on oversize undercarriage, "just in case", because the new technology gizmos will avoid boulders, avoid lateral motion, and avoid significant slopes.

and yet here we are with a modern vehicle over on it's side on a 12 degree incline.......

Edit to add....Just seen Scott Manley has now addressed the geometry issue:

Have you not been following events?
Government funded space exploration is old hat. It's private enterprise all the way now.

I have been following events and see nothing but failure. Government funded space exploration may be slow and expensive, but it works fine and produces results that teach us things we could not even imagine. No private enterprise would habe given us instruments like the Hubble and James Webb Space telescopes because there is no money to be made from them. As if money were important.

What failures? The peregrine mission is the only private spacecraft I can think of that completely failed. All the others seem to have at least partially fulfilled their brief.
As for Hubble.
I'm sorry but that is not true. Hubble didn't work, it's mirror was not manufactured correctly. It was a complete white elephant until it was fixed... At great expense.
I'll give you the JWT. A remarkable achievement.

When you say you've seen nothing but failure do you include SpaceX Falcon 9 and Heavy launches? Over 200 successful consecutive launches and recoveries. Even the Dragon capsules and fairings are reusable.
Meanwhile the Boeing Starliner is yet to be crew certified.
As for the SLS and Orion programs, a complete waste of money, decades late and not reusable.

Well, as long as they can climb out of the manned version after landing and push it upright again if necessary.

I was not insinuating that a couple of sticks be tied to the lander, merely making the point that lads in a cold field came up with a simple solution to a common problem landing model helis.
With a big budget and a host of space technicians and designers could they not come up with something equally as effective?

I stand corrected on my incorrect points.

But really, to not test or arm the LIDAR with the certain knowledge that any sideways movement would result in a topple....... That does not seem to be the actions of a top notch team.

Given that a non functioning LIDAR could and did jeopardise the whole mission and all the scientific payloads the investors had paid for; it does seem odd to me that there was only one LIDAR and that it was not tested on the launchpad before lift off. Didn't the Saturn V go through an extensive testing and checking procedure of all systems before takeoff?

I also wonder why designers don't use the same vehicle designs that have worked successfully before, e.g. the Mars landers. There's too much at stake to try out new designs, I would have thought ?

I think we need to be a bit careful about painting this as public sector bad, private good, or vice versa..

Remember (?) NASA has rarely if ever built spacecraft….historically they set the project goals and then put production out to tender (hence the old lowest bid joke about Atlas/Mercury). The previously mentioned Surveyor was I think built by Hughes..who in turn sub-contracted out the sub-assemblies…

NASA retained the project management and it would be a mix of NASA and sub-contractor employees who would put the whole combinations of vehicles (launcher, payload etc) together at the Cape or wherever.

What’s changed in recent years is NASA pushing more and more of the management and coordination out to the private sector and concentrating on the science side with schemes such as CLPS, where they pay for payload carriage but increasingly leave it to the private sector as to how to get the payload where it needs to go.

I agree about the testing. The prelaunch checklist no doubt will be scrutinised somewhat. Either a check was missed or a box was ticked when it shouldn't have been.
Short answers to your last point is, money and mission objectives.
This was supposed to be a relatively inexpensive pathfinder mission. Dropping a 'Curiosity' type rover on the moon would have been hugely expensive and considering the latitude and rocky terrain, not a particularly good idea.

TURIN:

" Dropping a 'Curiosity' type rover on the moon would have been hugely expensive and considering the latitude and rocky terrain, not a particularly good idea."

Costly yes, but wheeled vehicles (both manned and unmanned) have trundled around OK in the Moon...but I agree not at high latitude and yes they are expensive.

Uplinker:

"I also wonder why designers don't use the same vehicle designs that have worked successfully before, e.g. the Mars landers"

Lost of differences between Moon and Mars though.. simply from a landing POV a Mars lander vehicle has to survive an atmospheric entry, which is not the case for the Moon, hence Mars landers usually have heat shields and parachutes in addition to rockets for the final stages...Moon landers rely entirely on rocket power.

There's lots of other really significant differences, for example day length ..or more importantly night length (that means different specs for the ability to survive low temps)..

Fundamentally switching a Mars design to a Moon lander would almost certainly mean significant redesign...whether you're talking about a stationary vehicle or a Rover.

Yes but given the high chance of a topple, it would seem extremely important to mitigate that possibility.

The money element is often mentioned, but not having any mitigation is gambling the entire mission and all the money.

A certain aircraft manufacturer has recently 'demonstrated' the folly of relying on a single sensor.

Not to push a point, but hoping they design it so it won’t fall over onto the exit door.

I may have expressed myself a little too harsh... But few people know, that privately funded spaceflight is not a recent invention, because it began exactly 50 years ago with a company called "OTRAG" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG - there is an interesting documentary called "Fly Rocket Fly!" about it here (geman language with english subtitles only): Startseite-Englisch ? FLY ROCKET FLY ). The founder of that company was lectured by the same professors as I, but more then a decade earlier. I even applied for an internship but the company was already being dissolved then. Between OTRAG and SpaceX there have been several attempts at private enterprise spaceflight, some were total failures, others still exist as subcontractors. One of the last major failures was "Virgin Orbital" and honestly I don't see a bright future for "Virgin Galactic" either.

I count Hubble as one of the greatest successes of spaceflight ever. Because it was cleverly designed with in-orbit serviceability in mind. Therefore the initial flaw could be corrected. Not only is it a wonderful science tool, but also a strong reminder why human spaceflight is essential. Again, the cost is irrelevant, scientific advance has no price tag.

Falcon is indeed a success story. As for the Dragon capsule, it's development was funded and subcontracted by NASA just like the Apollo spacecraft 60 years ago. Not really private enterprise there. And how much the development of the Falcon rocket really cost only Elon Musk knows... Starship has yet to prove itself, but again, NASA funding and subcontracting for it's use as lunar lander takes some of the "private" aspect away.

I fully agree. Good lobbying from the industry combinded with weak project management from NASA.

So let's see how the remaining two missions of Intuitive Systems will perform!

I’ll just point out that the company is very much going down the SpaceX path of rapid prototyping and test flights to refine and develop. They have several more planned, as well as the lunar orbital constellation, which will carry multiple rovers and “hoppers”.

“Intuitive Machines’ second awarded flight, IM-2, is scheduled to land at the lunar South Pole in 2024. This will be the first on site, or in-situ, resource utilization demonstration on the Moon utilizing a drill and mass spectrometer to measure the volatile content of subsurface materials. The third Intuitive Machines awarded flight, IM-3, is scheduled to land at the Moon’s Reiner Gamma swirl in 2024 using the Nova-C lunar lander.”…..

​​​​​​​CLPS Flight: IM-2 

Expected Launch Date: 2024 

Landing Site: Shackleton Connecting Ridge 

Payloads: https://science.nasa.gov/lunar-scien...tive-machines/

Lander Name: Odysseus

Lander Class: Nova-C

Task Order Information: TO Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) 

 

CLPS Flight:  IM-3 

Expected Launch Date: 2024 

Landing Site: Reiner Gamma 

Payloads: https://science.nasa.gov/lunar-disco...liveries/cp-11 

Lander Name: Odysseus

Lander Class: Nova-C

Task Order Information: TO CP-11 (CLPS PRISM 11) 

All is slowly being revealed:

Full article here:

Ars Technica

FWIW NASA TV currently (Wednesday 1900 UTC) running a presser featuring the IM CEO and various NASA officials.

Everybody seems to very much on message with a common POV that despite the tilt on landing the mission is a massive success with lots of useful data gathered and lots still to come back.

I'm picturing a Road Runner or Bugs Bunny style cartoon with the lander getting close to the Moon and a white tipped can flicks out to tap-tap-tap on the lunar surface. The cane retracts and the lander just slams over. Maybe then a little flag that says "Bang!" pops out because there is no air on the Moon to hear the crash.

I do agree that getting the 999,999 correct decisions made is a great success even if 1 decision turned out poorly. I'd rather fix that one decision and maybe examine the few hundred that remained in the final touchdown than the 999,999 that went right before.

Not sure if the conference will be on catch up on NASA TV but this Guardian report summaries much of what was said:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ander-odysseus