The Odysseus spacecraft is hexagonal in shape with six landing legs, standing about 14 feet tall and five feet wide. For fans of “Dr. Who,” the science fiction television show, the body of the lander is roughly the size of the Tardis, the time-traveling spacecraft that, on the outside, looks like an old British police telephone booth.
NASA is the main customer for the Intuitive Machines flight, paying the company $77 million to deliver six instruments to the lunar surface. They are:
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A laser retroreflector array to bounce back laser beams fired from lunar orbit. That will act as a precise location marker for Odysseus. During the Apollo missions, astronauts left similar retroreflectors on the moon.
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A LIDAR instrument will precisely measure the spacecraft’s altitude and velocity as it descends to the surface. LIDAR is similar to radar, except that it uses laser light instead of radio waves.
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A stereo camera will capture video of the plume of dust kicked up by the lander’s engines during landing.
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A low-frequency radio receiver will measure the effects of charged particles near the lunar surface on radio signals. That will provide information that could aid the design of future radio observation on the lunar surface.
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The Lunar Node-1 navigation beacon seeks to demonstrate an autonomous navigation system.
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The lander’s propellant tank includes a NASA instrument that uses radio waves to measure how much propellant remains in the tank.
The lander is also carrying a few other payloads, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.; a precursor instrument for a future moon telescope; and an art project by Jeff Koons.