Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander is dead, just one day after it touched down at the moon’s south pole and tipped over. Luckily, the company says it was able to “accelerate several program and payload milestones” and deploy a few of the experiments that were riding shotgun before Athena’s lander ran out of juice.
The quick end to the Athena mission marks the second time in a row that Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the moon only to have the mission go quite literally sideways. The company’s Odysseus spacecraft touched down and then tipped over last February.
The troublesome Athena mission comes months after NASA tapped Intuitive Machines to help develop a lunar communications system in a contract that could be worth as much as $4.8 billion (though just $150 million of that is guaranteed).
The company said that the orientation of Athena’s solar panels, combined with the direction of the sun and the extreme cold temperatures of the crater where it landed, means the spacecraft cannot recharge its batteries. “The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission,” the company wrote in an update Friday.
Intuitive Machines says it was able to get NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment deployed. That experiment contains a drill that can penetrate up to three feet into the moon’s surface. The company didn’t clarify what other experiments it was able to deploy, but it was carrying a rover with Nokia cellular technology and a solid-state “lunar data center,” among others.
