Odysseus moon mission | Expert on what to know about lunar landing

If all goes according to plan a houston-based Aerospace company will land the first US spacecraft on the surface of the Moon in more than a half a century I am1 Odus lunar lander separation confirmed the spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit yesterday will try to touch down near the moon’s South Pole this

Afternoon if successful it will become the first private spacecraft to land on the moon and joining me now is Dan risken ctv’s Science and Technology expert uh Dan thank you as always for joining us and a fun exciting day ahead isn’t it it is I it’s been a dramatic

Couple months around the Moon I feel like I’ve been talking a lot about these Landings that are coming up and a lot of them have failed I I mean even the success successful ones have had slight failures the most recent Japan Landing uh they did land on the moon but they

Landed on their side uh so it wasn’t exactly perfect and before that Russia had a failed Landing Japan had a failed Landing the US had a a proposed Lander about a month ago that never got to the moon and ended up burning up in Earth’s

Atmosphere um the Moon is hard to get to and so uh at 5:30 Eastern today uh it’s hoped that this spacecraft is going to have a nice soft landing on the surface but uh it ain’t done till it’s done as as they say and they’re uh they’ll be

Keeping a close eye on it because it’s also Landing in Shadows at the South Pole which I guess makes for its own challenges it does and originally the plan was to land this in a quote unquote easier part of the moon but NASA is involved with this it is a private

Company but NASA has a bunch of instruments that are part of this Mission and uh what they ultimately decided is look if if NASA wants to send people to the South Pole of the Moon that’s the Artemis plan well that’s a place we need more information about so

They changed the mission uh as they were designing it and they decided to to shift gears and make this Landing a South Pole Landing so this is going to head for a an area close to South Pole the NASA instruments on board are going to measure how much dust is kicked up

During Landing they’re going to uh measure the uh position of the spacecraft as it’s coming in NASA has the opportunity here to test a bunch of their devices uh without having their own mission to the Moon to test them so it’s it’s a great costs saer for NASA

That way and then the private side is really fun too there’s um a piece of the spacecraft that’s gold colored is actually wrapped in a fabric that uh is from Columbia sportsare and it’s the same fabric they use in some jackets so they’re kind of getting some promotional

Uh stuff out of this and helping pay for the that way with their sort of big advertising bucks I guess um but the most fun piece of this the the thing that I’m really looking forward to is that there’s something called the eagle cam as this thing’s coming in for a

Landing it’s going to basically throw a selfie stick out the window and as they’re going down this selfie stick is going to make a video of The Landing as seen from some distance away and so uh I don’t know exactly how they’ve worked out the you know the gyroscopes and all

The pieces necessary to make that work but if it works we’ll eat like kings it’s gonna be a glorious piece of footage but we’ll see if it happens and they’re also the big thing too they’re looking for water right I mean or uh ice that’s the other thing they’re searching

For there and how important because the beauty of H2O is it’s got o in it which we breathe so that’s nice if you want to set up a lunar base it’d be nice to not have to bring oxygen tanks from Earth all the time be nice to have your own

Source of oxygen there H2O you can make hydrogen peroxide you can make water you can make all these different things that are useful not only for keeping humans alive but for making Rocket Fuel using nothing more than oxygen and hydrogen if you have the right kind of processing uh

Materials in place you can turn those into Rocket Fuel and so it’s so expensive to take anything to the Moon that if you are making a moon mission that requires you to bring in stuff like air to breathe that is way more expensive than if you can find a source

Of air right there so the South Pole is the leading candidate as a place to get uh harvestable H2O uh formed as ice that’s under the surface uh so the the hope is that these emis missions are going to lead to a renewable way to do that so that astronauts in the future

Can go there and just get what they need on in place and how long are they hoping before we go how long are they hoping this Lander will last well it’s not clear exactly how long this Lander is going to last but basically once the landing happens uh a lot of the big

Mission will have been completed um and and part of it is that once you land on the moon you stay on the moon right and so it’s going to become something of a artifact for Humanity and as in in that Spirit one of the items on board that I

Like most is a sculpture by the artist Jeff Coons now Jeff Coons is a famous sculptor he’s he’s best known for making these metallic balloon animals uh that you may have seen in different art galleries or in different uh they’re they’re quite well known in the art

World he has made a series of 125 moon-shaped sculptures those are sort of glued onto the side of the Lander so if it lands there there’s going to be a piece of art sitting on the moon waiting for all of us so we can go look at it

Someday and I hope someday we get to absolutely Dan always a pleasure talking I’d love to talk more about this but we run out of time thank you as always Dan risken ctv’s Science and Technology expert

A private U.S. lunar lander has reached the moon and will attempt to land. Dan Riskin explains what they are looking for.

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