Before it attempts to land on the moon, the lunar lander Odysseus, or IM-1, needs to slow its speed by about 4,026 miles per hour (about 6,500 kilometers per hour) to have a soft touchdown.
The spacecraft is on track to land around 6:24 p.m. ET Thursday near the lunar south pole.
Success is not guaranteed. Overall, more than half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure — tough odds for a feat humanity first pulled off nearly 60 years ago.
While technology has advanced in the past five decades, the fundamental challenges of landing on the moon remain the same. Here's what it will have to overcome:
- The sheer distance: It’s roughly a quarter-of-a-million-mile (402,000-kilometer) journey from Earth to the moon. If you could drive a car to the moon at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), it would take more than five months. Odysseus' trajectory required it to traverse even further, logging 620,000 miles (about 1 million kilometers) in space before entering lunar orbit.
- The tricky lunar terrain: The moon is covered in dead volcanoes and deep craters, making it difficult to find flat landing zones. Without the assistance of human eyes inside the spacecraft, modern-day robotic lunar landers use cameras, computers, and sensors equipped with software and artificial intelligence to safely find their landing spot — and avoid boulders and craters — during the final descent. And even humans in mission control rooms back on Earth can’t help the spacecraft in those final, critical seconds before touchdown.