IM-1 mission update: The moon lander is now in lunar orbit!

Intuitive Machines’ moon lander has made it to lunar orbit!

The landing is currently scheduled for tomorrow — Thursday, February 22, at 5:30 PM ET. NASA will have coverage on NASA TV starting at 4:15 PM ET. Assuming everything goes well, once the spacecraft touches down, it will take about 15 seconds for confirmation that the landing was successful.

The Nova-C lander, called Odysseus or Odie for short, is currently in good health on its way to the moon. Things are going really well; this image was taken when Odie was approximately 100,000 km from the moon.

Yesterday at 5 PM ET, Intuitive Machines confirmed that they’d completed the trajectory maneuvers for the mission. These were small engine burns to correct the spacecraft’s trajectory to ensure they’d make it to lunar orbit. There were three scheduled, but the first two were so precise that it actually eliminated the need for the third trajectory correction maneuver.

The spacecraft also completed its most challenging burn, the lunar orbit insertion burn, this morning. This was a 408-second burn of the main engine, and successful completion means that Odie is now in a 92-km circular orbit of the moon!

Over the next day, the team will analyze all the data, prep for landing, and get imagery of the moon from the spacecraft.

Now all that’s left is landing on the moon.