Athena didn’t crash. But what did happen to it?
Hours after the 15-foot-tall robotic spacecraft arrived at the moon’s surface, closer to the lunar south pole than any spacecraft has been, it remained unclear whether its touchdown was smooth enough to perform its intended work, or if it toppled over in the process, potentially limiting the mission’s scientific achievements.
“We’re trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit,” Tim Crain, the chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, said at a news conference.
The spacecraft is almost identical to Odysseus, the lander that the company sent to the moon last year. Odysseus was the first commercially operated vehicle to successfully land on the moon. But that success came with an asterisk when the vehicle toppled shortly after reaching the ground.
It appears that might have happened again.
At a post-landing news conference, Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said the spacecraft had sent back conflicting data about whether it was standing upright or tipped over. But a sensor known as an inertial measurement unit offered a perhaps convincing clue that Athena was on its side.
As it headed to the lunar surface, laser instruments that measured the lander’s altitude were providing noisy data, which may have contributed to the botched landing.
Until that final descent, Athena had performed much more smoothly than the Odysseus lander a year ago, said Dr. Crain of Intuitive Machines. “We were expecting a fully successful landing,” he said.
Mr. Altemus said it was too soon to determine how much of the planned mission could still be salvaged. Athena’s payloads include a drill, three small rovers and a rocket-powered hopping drone.
“When we get that full assessment, we will then work closely with NASA science and technology groups to identify science objectives that are the highest priority,” Mr. Altemus said. “And then we’ll figure out what the mission profile will look like.”
The spacecraft is not generating as much power as it should, probably because the solar panels are not pointed in the correct direction.
Images from cameras on the spacecraft will help Intuitive Machines figure out the orientation of the spacecraft. Dr. Crain said the spacecraft probably set down outside of the planned landing zone but was confident it was still somewhere on Mons Mouton, a high plateau near the south pole that Athena was to explore.
Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will pass over the landing site, could pinpoint Athena’s precise location.
It has been a busy week in spaceflight and on the moon. Intuitive Machines was the second company to reach the lunar surface this week, after Firefly Aerospace, another Texas space company, successfully reached the Mare Crisium region of the moon on Sunday morning.
“Any time humanity puts a lander on the moon, it’s a good day,” Dr. Crain said.
The main customer of both missions is NASA under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which hires private companies to take NASA-financed science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. The NASA contract for this mission is worth up to $62.5 million, but Intuitive Machines may not be paid the full amount.
Shares of Intuitive Machines, which trades under the name LUNR after going public in 2023, tumbled after reports of the spacecraft’s problems. Its stock fell 20 percent on Thursday.
The main payload on Athena is a drill for NASA that will extract lunar soil to be sniffed by a mass spectrometer for frozen water and other compounds. NASA officials said it might be possible for the drill to work, even if the spacecraft was not vertical. “It doesn’t have to be directly where I can drill straight down,” said Clayton Turner, the associate administrator for NASA’s space technology mission director. “There are other options we can use, too.”
Also aboard is a rover the size of a small dog that will test a Nokia cellphone network on the moon, and two smaller rovers, one built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the other by a Japanese company. Intuitive Machines also planned to test a rocket-powered vehicle called a hopper that could explore places not easily reached by rovers.
A parade of lunar landers is expected to continue through the rest of the year.
One of those spacecraft is already in space. The Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan was launched on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that sent Firefly’s Blue Ghost on its way. But it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient path to the moon. It will enter orbit around the moon around May 6 and try a landing a month later at Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, in the moon’s northern hemisphere.
In the fall, Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh is planning to try to get to the moon flying a large lander known as Griffin that will carry a commercial rover designed by Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo., among other cargo.
The most intriguing lander is the one planned by Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos. The lander, known as Blue Moon Mark 1, will be the largest spacecraft ever to set down on the moon, even larger than the ones that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo moon landings more than 50 years ago.
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