The intuitive machine landed a second spacecraft on the moon just a year after achieving the feat for the first time. Unfortunately, just like that initial attempt, it appears that the company’s spacecraft may have tilted towards that side.
A lunar lander called Athena landed on the surface of the moon at about 12:30pm on Thursday. It is the second private spacecraft to land this week after the Blue Ghost of Firefly Aerospace landed on March 2nd.
The Chief Technology Officer of the Intuitive Machine said at a post-landing press conference that Athena was somewhere in the 50-meter landing zone of Mons Mouton, a flat mountain in the moon’s Antarctica. However, he said the company is still working to determine where Athena landed.
CEO Steve Altemus added during the meeting that the company does not believe Athena is “right attitude.” SpaceFlight says it “probably turned it over.”
Otherwise, Artemas praised the mission.
The rest of Athena missions currently rest on balance. The spacecraft, which took off towards the moon on February 26th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carries many of the technologies that intuitive machines wanted to test.
One is a passive laser retro leaflet array. An intuitive machine would like to be used to communicate with other incoming or cyclical spacecraft. This is a key technology for NASA’s hope to build a permanent moon foundation. That’s why the space agency awarded an intuitive machine a $4.8 billion contract late last year to build a communications system. (Of of this, only $150 million is guaranteed.)
Athena is also conducting NASA ice mining experiments. This was something I wanted to use to determine if there was enough natural resources to make fuel or breathable oxygen on the moon.
Additional payloads include a rover called Maps, which is supposed to be testing cellular equipment from Nokia, and solid-state storage, which was billed as the first ever “Lunar Data Center.”
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