{"id":44763,"date":"2025-03-08T22:58:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-08T14:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/after-less-than-a-day-the-athena-lander-is-dead-on-the-moon\/"},"modified":"2025-03-08T22:58:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T14:58:06","slug":"after-less-than-a-day-the-athena-lander-is-dead-on-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/after-less-than-a-day-the-athena-lander-is-dead-on-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intuitive Machines announced on Friday morning that its Athena<\/em> mission to the surface of the Moon, which landed on its side, has ended.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the direction of the Sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cThe mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Athena<\/em>, a commercially developed lander, touched down on the lunar surface on Thursday at 11:28 am local time in Houston (17:28 UTC). The probe landed within 250 meters of its targeted landing site in the Mons Mouton region of the Moon. This is the southernmost location that any probe has landed on the Moon, within a few degrees of the lunar south pole.<\/p>\n

D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu for IM-2<\/h2>\n

This marked the Houston-based company\u2019s second lunar mission. The first one, a little more than a year ago, suffered a problem with its laser rangefinders prior to landing. Although it touched down softly, this first lander reached the Moon going slightly faster than intended\u2014and in a location with a steeper slope. It broke a landing leg and toppled over. However, even in this configuration, the Odysseus<\/em> mission was able to generate power and complete a significant portion of its scientific objectives over the course of a week of activity on the Moon.<\/p>\n

Intuitive Machines has not yet said precisely what happened in Athena<\/em>\u2018s final moments before it reached the Moon on Thursday. However, in a news conference on Thursday afternoon, company officials confirmed that they had experienced another problem with the laser rangefinders. This caused the spacecraft to, again, not know precisely where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, or how high.<\/p>\n

The Athena<\/em> mission was funded in significant part by NASA. The space agency has begun to hire commercial companies like Intuitive Machines to deliver scientific experiments to the lunar surface as it gears up for a human exploration program near the South Pole of the Moon.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

NASA expected Athena<\/em> to have a reasonable chance of success. Although it landed on its side, Odysseus<\/em> was generally counted as a win because it accomplished most of its tasks. Accordingly, NASA loaded a number of instruments onto the lander. Most notable among these was the PRIME-1 experiment, an ice drill to sample and analyze any ice that lies below the surface.<\/p>\n

A dark day, but not the end<\/h2>\n

\u201cAfter landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA\u2019s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander\u2019s batteries depleted,\u201d the company\u2019s statement said. However, this likely means that the company was able to contact the instrument but not perform any meaningful scientific activities.<\/p>\n

NASA has accepted that these commercial lunar missions are high-risk, high-reward. (Firefly\u2019s successful landing last weekend offers an example of high rewards). It is paying the companies, on average, $100 million or less per flight. This is a fraction of what NASA would pay through a traditional procurement program. The hope is that, after surviving initial failures, companies like Intuitive Machines will learn from their mistakes and open a low-cost, reliable pathway to the lunar surface.<\/p>\n

Even so, this failure has to be painful for NASA and Intuitive Machines. The space agency lost out on some valuable science, and Intuitive Machines has taken a step backward with this mission rather than moving forward as it had hoped to do.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, this is unlikely to be the end for the company. NASA has committed to a third and fourth mission on Intuitive Machines\u2019 lander, the next of which could come during the first quarter of 2026. NASA has also contracted with the company to build a small network of satellites around the Moon for communications and positioning services. So although the company\u2019s fortunes look dark today, they are not permanently shadowed like the craters on the Moon that NASA hopes to soon explore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intuitive Machines announced on Friday morning that its Athena mission to the surface of the Moon, which landed on its side, has ended. \u201cWith the direction of the Sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,\u201d the company said in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[503,21],"class_list":["post-44763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-intuitive-machines","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44763"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}