The intuitive machines have landed a second spacecraft on the moon, just a year after the completion of the achievement for the first time. Unfortunately, like this first attempt, it seems that the company’s spacecraft may have been overturned on its side.
Lunar Lander, called Athena, touched the moon surface around 12:30 pm Et on Thursday. It is the second private spacecraft landing on the moon this week, as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost touched on March 2.
The head of intuitive technology said at a press conference after landing that Athena is somewhere in the 50 -meter landing zone in Mons Mouton, a mountain flat on the south pole of the moon. But he said the company was still working to determine where, exactly, Athena touched.
CEO Steve Altemus added during the Conference that the company does not believe that Athena is at the “right attitude” – Spaceflight talks about “probably inhibited”.
Altemus otherwise praised the mission, which he said he went much more smoothly than last year’s trip to the moon.
The rest of Athena’s mission is now hanging in balance. The spacecraft, which took off for the moon on a Rocket SpaceX Falcon 9 on February 26, carries a series of technologies that intuitive machines hope to try.
One is a passive laser overturning array, which intuitive machines hope to use to communicate with other incoming or rotating spacecraft. It is a crucial part of NASA’s hopes of building a permanent moon base – so much so that the space service is awarding intuitive machinery a $ 4.8 billion contract at the end of last year to build the communications system. (Only $ 150 million from this is guaranteed.)
Athena also carries an ice mining experiment for NASA, which the body hoped to use to determine if there are enough natural resources on the moon in one day to fuel or breathable oxygen.
Additional beneficial loads include a cursor called MAPP that is supposed to test the cellular equipment by Nokia and the storage of solid status priced as the first “lunar data center”.
