The Houston-based company has pulled off the first successful commercial landing on the lunar surface. It's America's first soft landing in decades.The U.S. just landed its first commercial mission on the surface of the moon. On Thursday, the robotic probe known as Odysseus successfully touched down near the lunar south pole.last week aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Odysseus’ Terrain Relative Navigation camera captured this image of the Bel’kovich K crater in the Moon’s northern equatorial highlands.Odysseus landed near Malapert crater — a large crater near the moon's south pole. That location offers several advantages, says Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
"The ultimate goal of some of this is to use the moon's resources to enable exploration further out into the solar system," she says.NASA hopes the CLPS program will help build a network of private suppliers that will allow the United States to once again land astronauts on the lunar surface. It wants commercial companies to scout out locations, land scientific instruments and rovers, and pave the way for human exploration.