Morehead State University gets recognized by NASA during lunar mission

MOREHEAD, Ky. ( FOX 56 ) — NASA leaders are praising a Kentucky university after a recent lunar landing. Staff and students stepped in to help when things didn’t go as planned.

February was a historic month for Morehead State University’s Space Science Center, as it was a link from the eastern part of Kentucky to the south pole of the moon.

LATEST KENTUCKY NEWS

• West Jessamine student gets perfect ACT score
• ‘Pink Moon’ to rise in Kentucky skies after the Lyrid Meteor Shower peaks
• Pedestrian fatally struck by train near Waveland Museum

“It’s called the intuitive machines one, IM-1 mission, and it was a historical mission in that it was the first time a non-government organization landed hardware on the surface of the moon,” said Executive Director for MSU’s Space Science Center, Dr. Ben Malphrus.

The company Intuitive Ma chines out of Houston built and launched a robotic lander, and MSU used its space tracking station to allow the scientists on Earth to communicate with the equipment, which became more critical after a bumpy landing.

“We had a planned role in an unexpected role in the IM-1 mission. Our planned role was to be one of the ground stations, a part of this commercial lunar network. But the spacecraft had a little bit of an issue when it landed on the moon,” Dr. Malphrus said.

ALL ABOUT KENTUCKY

• How much does the ‘American dream’ cost in Kentucky?
• The U.S. has more ‘million-dollar’ cities than ever. Are any in Kentucky?
• Here are the happiest cities in the U.S., according to new report

NASA leaders are calling the university the ‘savior’ of the mission.

“So, it landed perfectly, but it had broken a leg and it tipped over when it landed and so when it tipped over, the antennas were not pointed toward the earth; they were pointed up into space so all the ground stations could all see that the lander had landed, but none of us had enough power, radio power to get through to issue commands to it to get the data down,” Dr. Malphrus said.

That’s when Dr. Malphrus and his team jumped in quickly to help.

“It was about 10 P.M. at night, so I head in, and people are already here, you know, working away and so I hop in because they were adapting an older code that I had written for a previous project, and I was helping them to adapt it to the new scenario we were working with,” mission operations engineer Emily Walter said.

Walter’s code was a key part of getting commands through.

“It gives me chills even now, thinking about it that we were able to have such a hand and, you know, a critical like pathway for this to make this mission like as successful as it was,” said Walter.

Malphrus said he’s thankful for these types of opportunities to work with NASA and is proud that many future workers in the space industry will have been trained in eastern Kentucky.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 56 News.