Another robotic landing on the moon was made last week on Feb 21. Intuitive Machines, in collaboration with NASA, had launched its lunar lander, named Odysseus, on Feb 15. It carried a number of instruments for scientific exploration.
After 6 days, it landed near the lunar south pole. Unfortunately, similar to the JAXA SLIM lander few weeks ago, it tipped over after landing and is now lying on its side on a dusty slope of a lunar crater. It came down too fast (there was a navigation system failure too) and had a lateral speed of 2 mph. It has been able to communicate with mission control, although it will likely run out of solar power today.
It is the first American commercial landing on the moon since the Apollo days.
This was the mission objective -
This is the unfortunate outcome -
Soon after launch, the Odysseus took this image of the spacecraft beautifully framing the blue marble.
This is an image taken and sent soon after it landed and tipped over.
Space is hard. Landing on the moon is even harder.
Now let’s land today’s puzzle composed by British Chess composer Percy Francis Blake (1873 -1936) in 1896.
P.S.
The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. ET.
It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the minimum number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But there are no hard-and-fast rules; feel free to post comments as you please.
