The intuitive machine, the Athena Lander, is dead a day after landing and flipping over at the moon’s Antarctic. Luckily, the company says it was able to “accelerate several programs and payload milestones” and unfold several experiments that Athena’s Lander was riding a shotgun before he ran out of juice.
The Athena Mission quick end marks the second time in a row that the intuitive machine landed the spacecraft on the moon. The company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed and turned over in February last year.
The nasty Athena Mission comes just a few months after NASA taps on an intuitive machine to help develop the monthly communications system on a contract worth $4.8 billion (but only $150 million guaranteed).
The company said the orientation of the solar panels in Athena, combined with the direction of the sun and the extremely cold temperatures of the crater it landed in, mean that the spacecraft cannot charge the battery. “The mission has concluded and the team continues to evaluate the data collected throughout the mission,” the company wrote in an update Friday.
According to the intuitive machine, NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment can be deployed. The experiment includes a drill that can penetrate the surface of the moon up to three feet. The company did not clarify what other experiments could have been deployed, but carried rovers such as Nokia Cellular Technology and solid “Moon Data Center.”
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