It has been over 50 years since a vehicle launched by the U.S. has landed on the Moon. The return has been completed: the robotic Odysseus lander launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket touched down autonomously on the lunar surface on February 22.

The craft’s Terrain Relative Navigation camera captured this image of the Bel’kovich K crater in the Moon’s northern equatorial highlands. Source: Intuitive Machines

This first U.S. lunar lander mission since Apollo 17 in 1972 is also notable as the first lunar landing by a privately owned and operated spacecraft. The successful touchdown by the system engineered by Houston, Texas-based Intuitive Machines was confirmed after a 13-minute radio communications gap between Odysseus and mission control.

The mission is part of a NASA project to collect data about the Moon’s southern polar region prior to establishing Artemis bases to accommodate astronauts. The Odysseus payload includes a Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing that recorded data during descent and landing, and instrumentation designed to study how the spacecraft's engine exhaust interacts with lunar dirt and rock. Additional equipment will demonstrate autonomous positioning technology, which could eventually become part of a GPS-like navigation system on and around the Moon.

These and other systems will now operate for about seven Earth days on the lunar surface. The mission will end when the sun goes down at the Malapert A impact crater in the southern lunar region, as Odysseus was not designed to survive the intense cold of the long lunar night.