Odysseus, the first lander of intuitive machinery, landed on the moon in February 2024, but it was not perfect.
The spaceship was almost doomed before it left Earth. Safety switches on laser equipment for measuring the altitude of spacecraft were still effective and they were not available. The mission controller was not aware of the error until Odysseus got on track around the moon 200,000 miles away. There was no way to solve the problem.
Odysseus was also carrying experimental equipment called the Navigation Doppler Rider, who wanted to test NASA. This is a more sophisticated instrument with three laser beams that measure not only the altitude, but also the speed of the spacecraft during descent.
The intuitive machine engineer quickly patched Odysseus' software to replace the NASA equipment. It was completed in time except that I forgot to update one parameter in my computer code and the navigation software ignored the altitude data.
Surprisingly, Odysseus was still able to land using only an estimate of altitude, but the estimate was not perfect.
When it touched the ground, the lander was descending faster than expected, moving sideways at two miles per hour, where movement was supposed to be completely vertical. As a result, the spaceship fell.
Odysseus continued to be active and was able to communicate with mission control on an intuitive machine. In other words, it was counted as a successful landing. But in the fallen direction, Odysseus was unable to do much of the scientific work it sent to.
Coincidentally, the lunar lander sent by the Japanese space agency Jakusa had also been turned over a month ago. In that case, the nozzle of one of the Lander's main engines fell, and the spacecraft was unable to completely compensate.
