Odysseus lander reaches moon, but tips over

A US spacecraft is on the moon for the first time in 50 years officials confirming odys touchdown near the South Pole though not completely upright the spacecraft reported to have caught a foot in the surface and tipped over on its side the company behind the launch saying most of the scientific

Instruments it’s carrying are still in a position to work and for more on this we’re joined by the one and only Bob McDonald he’s cbc’s National Science commentator host of cbc’s quirks and quirks great to see you Bob um you know I imagine you watching this holding your

Breath and and then hearing that it actually touched down breathing a s of relief but now hearing that it’s on its side what do you think about this Landing what what are you worried about well and it was an interesting experience because as it was coming down I thought wow everything’s working just

Fine then all of a sudden they lost contact with it and I went uhoh it’s always that last meter that gets you you know you can get all the way to the moon and then at the very last second you can trip and fall over and this had happened

To a Japanese robot that tried to land just recently it did the same thing it tripped and it ended up upside down so that was what was going through my mind but uh eventually you know they did reestablish contact with it so it wasn’t a perfect Landing but at least they’re

On the surface yeah and there there are some instruments and as we say that you know the instruments uh we’re hearing uh most of them are uh still able to uh carry on the work that they were sent there to do uh I think there was some

Lasers or something like that can you explain to us what’s on uh what’s on this Lander and you know what what it what it was there for uh and How likely it is that it’s still working well they know it is still working there’s about 12 different

Instruments that are on there and uh the one that I find really interesting is a Canadian experiment most people don’t realize that Canada is part of this project uh we were involved in the navigation on how to find the landing site and come down uh and there’s a

Camera on it there’s a little camera that is not going to actually look at the moon it’s supposed to look up and take pictures of the Milky Way and astronomical objects and even look back at the Earth and then send those pictures back to the Earth to see if it

Would be possible to put a telescope at the South pole of the Moon and but now that this thing is lying on its side I don’t know which way that camera is pointing and whether or not they’ll be able to do that but I hope that that

Works the point is Canada’s part of it just as we always have been we we don’t build big Rockets we don’t make a lot of noise but we do build Precision Instruments and we were part of this team as well and you know where this

Landed as well I know this was a big part of uh how significant this is what is is it that uh you’re hoping that science will be able to glean from this operation and specifically where this land or touchdown yeah it landed very close to

The South Pole of the Moon and that is a special Target of future missions including some of the human missions to the Moon because there are places at the bottoms of craters that never see the Sun at the South Pole the sun is very

Very low on the horizon so if you have a bowl the sunlight doesn’t get into it and they’re permanently shaded they’re very very cold and it’s believed that there’s ice there now on the moon ice is a valuable valuable resource because it can provide water for people who are

There but it can also provide Rocket Fuel because water is made of hydrogen and oxygen and when you separate that out that’s Rocket Fuel so ice is going to be like gold people are going to be mining it which raises some interesting questions supposedly nobody owns the

Moon but are we going to have mineral right is issues there in the future but that’s why they’re going to the South Pole to find out how much ice is there and how it can be uh can be used now we we talked a little bit about some of the

Science that’s on board here uh some of that uh payload and the science that they’re they’re hoping to accomplish here but let’s talk about uh this private partnership with NASA uh NASA has $118 million riding on this they’re paying intuitive that much money what’s the benefit to NASA of this kind of

Private partnership when we look forward into sort of the next Frontier of space exploration well from NASA’s point of view this is a really cheap way to go to the Moon a $100 million might sound a lot to us but to the space program that’s Penny change their normal way of

Going into space is to use giant big Rockets like the one that’s going to carry our Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen the big SLS that has only flown once when that thing flies it costs $4 billion just to get off the ground and go to the moon so here they are using

The private sector which can build Rockets much cheaper and get up into space with the uh with the instruments like SpaceX SpaceX flies for 10 times less than what NASA does because everything’s Under One Roof it’s a smaller team they build their own Rockets whereas NASA usually has to

Employ people from all over the country to build their Rockets it’s the uh sort of a w make work project so it’s two different ways and NASA is now just a paying customer on the private providers like SpaceX soon blue origin and these other companies so if it’s a cheaper way

To go I’m I’m all for it Bargain Basement deal there as you say um and now that we know that it’s there on its side or not what are you going to be watching for now uh as we go forward uh with this Mission well the one thing I’m

Looking forward to is another little camera that they have on on board that was supposed to pop out just before it landed turn around and give us some pictures of the spacecraft actually coming down in landing which we’ve never seen before well that didn’t happen during the landing but they think they

Can still pop it out and let it go a little distance away and look back and see this thing lying on its side on the moon so we can get a a picture of what it’s really like so that’s the first thing that I’m looking forward to and

Then after that um well let’s see what happens as we continue with uh not only robots but people to the Moon don’t remember uh don’t forget that Jeremy Hansen is going to go there he’s not going to land but he’s going to go and see The Far Side of the Moon and have

Both the moon and the earth and the same frame out his window that’s going to be very interesting and I’m sure Jeremy Hansen watching this as well very carefully as you have been Bob McDonald always a pleasure to talk to you thanks for explaining this for us today thank

You Linda it’s always my pleasure

A privately owned lunar lander made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. The company that made the lander says it tipped over during the landing, but still has some operational capacity.

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