Odysseus: The mission to prevent 'spaceship sandblasting'

Lunar exploration is heating up once more, and it is also changing. Intuitive Machines, a firm based in Houston, Texas, is hoping to become the first commercial company to successfully land on the Moon on Thursday, 22 February.

The strikingly tall, hexagonal cylinder Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 15 February and successfully entered lunar orbit on 21 February. It is aiming to soft-land in the crater Malapert A in the region of the Moon's south pole at around 22:30GMT (16:30CT) 22 February.

If successful, the mission will be the first American lunar landing in more than 50 years, since the crewed Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. It's part of Nasa's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative intended to support the agency’s Artemis programme that is aiming to send astronauts back to the Moon and even build a permanent base there. An earlier attempt to land on the Moon by the Peregrine mission from Astrobotic under the same initiative in January was unsuccessful.

But landing on the lunar surface is only the beginning. Odysseus will then begin a suite of experiments that will hopefully provide data useful for a wave of future missions and help to ensure the safety of humans when they eventually return to set foot on the lunar regolith.

A set of four tiny cameras funded by Nasa are installed around the base of Odysseus. These cameras, or the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (Scalpss), are designed to collect still frame and video footage of the landing and how the exhaust plume from Odysseus's landing engines interact with the dusty lunar surface. Teams of scientists back on Earth will then use the data to build 3D models of the landing site, before and after landing, measuring how the landscape changes. While small, these instruments will help with the work needed to make sustained lunar exploration safe.