Athena Lander overturned in the shade of a crater about 820 feet (200 meters) from its expected landing site. Credit: intuitive machines
The IM-2 mission of intuitive machines ended after her lunar Lander, Athena, apparently overturned while landing and stopped yesterday on her part in a shadow crater, announced the company. In a statement released this morning, the company said that his batteries exhausted and did not expect him to wake up.
Athena’s face plant was the second rough moon of the intuitive car after last year’s Odysseus Lander broke a leg and settled on the surface of the corner moon. Even that mission ended in advance since its solar panels could not be oriented directly to the sun, but it worked on the surface for six days. The surface mission of Athena – originally scheduled for 10 days – lasted less than 13 hours.
The company said that “mission controllers have been able to speed up several programs and milestones”, also for its primary useful load, first-1, a NASA tool equipped with a drill to study water ice under its surface. NASA declared in a declaration that intuitive machines had returned some data for the agency. Although the orientation of the Lander prevented the drill of actually operating on the lunar ground, they were able to test its range of movement. The Massa Prime-1 spectrometer also returned some data before the batteries were exhausted, although probably of gas from the Lander engine, not of subsoil soil as expected.
Until yesterday, the IM-2 mission had gone according to the plans. After the launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 26, the Lander reached the lunar orbit before going down to its destination, the plateau at the top of Mons Mouton, near the South Pole of the Moon. But to landing, the mission team had difficulty determining the orientation of the trade and where it landed in the region.
The intuitive machines later localized Athena to about 820 feet (250 meters) from her target position on Mons Mouton, inside a crater. A transmitted image showed the trade lying on one side, partly in the shade, with two legs that attached themselves to the sunlight.
Due to the extreme cold within the crater, the direction of the sun and the orientation of the solar panels, the company does not expect the trade to be able to recharge the batteries.
One of Athena’s other payloads, a small rover named Mapp (abbreviation of a platform for autonomous mobile prospecting), was able to turn on and transmit data and “was ready to drive,” said his manufacturer, Outpost Lunar – but it could not be distributed.
On the positive side, intuitive machines noticed that IM-2 “was ever reached the southernmost lunar landing and surface operations”,
Intuitive Machines planned to send its IM-3 mission to the Gamma Luna Reiner region with four useful loads of NASA, as well as a rover and relay satellite. It could be launched already from next year.
It was not possible to reach NASA and intuitive machines for a comment before the publication.
Challenges of space
Two missions that were launched as PayLoad Rideshare on the same spacex Falcon 9 rocket of IM-2 have also faced serious setbacks.
Mission controller are trying to restore contact with NASA’s lunar pioneer, a $ 95 million satellite designed to map the distribution of different forms of water through the moon. Managed by Caltech’s infrared processing and analysis center in Pasadena, California, the team was initially able to communicate with the trade. But shortly after the launch he encountered power problems and the team lost communication with it the next morning.
The mission team thinks that the trade is slowly turning in a low power state, NASA said in a declaration of March 4th. Lunar Trailblazer is taking a tortuous and loop path to the moon designed to save fuel. But the communication problems prevented the boat from carrying out maneuvers to keep it on the route. The mission team is now tracing alternative paths on the moon that “could be able to position the lunar trailblazer in lunar orbit and allow him to complete some of his scientific objectives”, said NASA, but which depends on restoring contact.
“NASA sends high-risk and high-level missions such as Lunar Trailblazer to make incredible sciences at a lower cost, and the team really incapsula the innovative spirit of the NASA-if someone can bring Lunar Trailblazer back, it is them,” said Nicky Fox, associated administrator of the NASA of his scientific division, in the note.
Another mission that took a ride to the launch of IM-2 was Odin, a small Startup Astroforge satellite designed to collect data and images from Asteroid 2022 OB5 for potential mining. AstroForge claims to have built the trade in less than 10 months for 3.5 million dollars.
But immediately after Odin was deployed, his operators had numerous technical problems in their land stations, said the company. Their operational team attempted to restore contact, receiving unexpected help from amateur radio operators. But on March 6, with the boat that traveled further away and its position that grew more and more uncertain, Astroforgge considered it most likely unrecoverable.
Note of the editor: This story has been updated to include information from the NASA declaration.
