First image of Odysseus on the moon released after historic landing

The first photo of the Odysseus lunar lander on the moon, the first U.S. spacecraft to make a soft landing on the lunar surface in more than 50 years, was released Monday.

The image shows the spacecraft within one mile (1.6 kilometers) of its intended landing site at the Malapert A crater near the South Pole, the farthest south any vehicle has been able to reach on the moon. More images are expected to be released later on Monday.

"Images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team confirmed Odysseus completed its landing at 80.13 [degrees] S and 1.44 [degrees] E at a 2,579 [meters] elevation," Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built Odysseus, posted Monday morning on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

"After traveling more than 600,000 miles, Odysseus landed within 1.5 [kilometers] of its intended Malapert A landing site, using a contingent laser range-finding system patched hours before landing," the post continued.

Although images were originally expected sooner, Odysseus' landing site near the South Pole means it takes longer for the images to reach the Deep Space Network -- NASA's array of antennas that provide telecommunications around the world -- and then be transmitted back to Earth.

Despite technical issues nearly causing a delay, Odysseus reached the surface of the moon at approximately 6:23 p.m. ET on Feb. 22, also making it the first commercial lunar landing in U.S. history.

Odysseus has less than one week to capture data before darkness descends, preventing the spacecraft's solar panels from gathering energy from sunlight, and also bringing freezing temperatures.

Intuitive Machines said it expects the flight controllers at the command center to be able to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.

Intuitive Machines was one of several companies approved by NASA under Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts to build private lunar landers that the federal space agency, among others, would use to send instruments into space in preparation for its upcoming Artemis missions, which will send astronauts back to the moon for the first time since Apollo 17's crew landed there in December 1972.