Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander is useless, simply at some point after it touched down on the moon’s south pole and tipped over. Fortunately, the corporate says it was in a position to “speed up a number of program and payload milestones” and deploy just a few of the experiments that have been using shotgun earlier than Athena’s lander ran out of juice.
The short finish to the Athena mission marks the second time in a row that Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the moon solely to have the mission go fairly actually sideways. The corporate’s Odysseus spacecraft touched down after which tipped over final February.
The troublesome Athena mission comes months after NASA tapped Intuitive Machines to assist develop a lunar communications system in a contract that might be price as a lot as $4.8 billion (although simply $150 million of that’s assured).
The corporate mentioned that the orientation of Athena’s photo voltaic panels, mixed with the course of the solar and the acute chilly temperatures of the crater the place it landed, means the spacecraft can’t recharge its batteries. “The mission has concluded and groups are persevering with to evaluate the info collected all through the mission,” the corporate wrote in an replace Friday.
Intuitive Machines says it was in a position to get NASA’s Polar Sources Ice Mining Experiment deployed. That experiment accommodates a drill that may penetrate as much as three ft into the moon’s floor. The corporate didn’t make clear what different experiments it was in a position to deploy, nevertheless it was carrying a rover with Nokia mobile know-how and a solid-state “lunar knowledge middle,” amongst others.
