Undated image of the intuitive machine’s Lunar Lander. |Picture source: AP
Officials confirmed that the private lunar lander no longer works after landing on the side of the crater near the South Pole of the Moon and its mission is over.
The news comes after an explosive landing attempt for Texas intuitive machines.
The company said that the Athena, launched last week, launched more than 250 meters of marks last week, eventually entering a cold crater and pronounced dead.
Athena managed to send the picture back to confirm its location and activate some experiments before remaining silent. NASA and other customers filled landers with tens of millions of dollars worth of experiments, including ice drills, drones and a pair of roaming untapped terrain before they were scheduled to arrive later this year.
Given the sharp and extreme mountain passes of the lander’s solar panels, it’s unlikely that Athena’s battery will be charged.
“The mission has concluded that the team is continuing to evaluate the data collected throughout the mission,” the company said in a statement.
The larger four-wheel rovers never stood out from the fallen lander, says Lunar Outpost, Colorado, which owns it, but the data shows it survived and if everything goes well, it can be driven away.
This is the second landing attempt of an intuitive machine. The first one a year ago also ended with a side landing, but the company was able to keep it going for longer. Despite all the problems, the company’s first lander brought the United States back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
Earlier this week, another Texas-based company made a successful landing under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, which aims to start business on the moon as it prepares for the return of astronauts. Firefly Aerospace places its blue ghost lander at the northernmost latitude near the moon.
Firefly CEO Jason Kim reported on March 7 that eight of the 10 NASA experiments in Blue Ghost have achieved their mission goals. It is expected to run for another week until the end of the sun and moon, and solar energy is no longer available.
Given the sun’s angle, limited communication with the Earth and unknown rugged terrain, the Moon’s Antarctic region is particularly difficult to reach and operate. The landing point of Athena is the closest distance to the spacecraft, only 160 kilometers away from the Antarctic.
This is how NASA’s goal is to astronauts’ first landings since the Apollo project in the 1960s and 1970s, no earlier than 2027. The crater is believed to hold a large amount of frozen water that can be used by future crews to drink alcohol and turn into rocket fuel.
The intuitive machine signed a contract with NASA for two other moon landing delivery. The company said it will need to determine exactly what went wrong this time before launching the next mission. After the 4.7-meter-high Athena landed, the controller hurriedly shut down some of the lander’s equipment to save power while trying to save what they could do.
During these two intuitive machine logins, problems arose at the last minute of Prime laser navigation system.
Intuitive machine rocket elastic drone Grace should jump over the moon’s surface and then jump into the crater for frozen water. Two homeless people from two other companies, one American and one Japanese, will also be reconnaissance in the area.
Before the lander’s battery died, NASA’s ice drill was activated, but was unable to penetrate the moon’s surface as planned given that the lander was prone. The flight controller did manage to spin the exercises to prove that it works, and a peer science tool gathered some data, NASA said. According to the intuitive machine, several other mission goals have also accelerated.
NASA paid $62 million to intuitive machines to bring three of its experiments to the moon.
publishing – March 10, 2025 at 12:28 pm
