An American company has become the first private entity to land a spacecraft on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines, which is based in Houston in the United States, landed a robot near the lunar south pole.
According to the BBC, this is the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s that an American-made craft has landed on the Moon.
The American space agency, NASA, purchased space on the craft for scientific instruments, so it can conduct a number of experiments.
Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, was quoted as saying: ‘The US has returned to the Moon. Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company – an American company – launched and led the voyage up there. And today is the day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships.’
This landing place is at the most southerly point that any spacecraft has ever landed on the Moon.
A number of scientific experiments will be conducted, primarily regarding the behaviour of lunar dust, which was a serious nuisance for the Apollo astronauts.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/53530904766/]