Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander flipped on its side during its March 6 landing in a small crater near the moon’s south pole. The orientation prevented the lander’s solar panels from generating enough power, and Intuitive Machines declared the Athena mission a failure. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found and photographed the site of Athena’s landing and demise on March 7.
Image source: Intuitive Machines
«Athena suffered the same fate as Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander, Odyssey. It also capsized, leading to similar consequences: no batteries could be recharged and the mission was soon over. The company made dozens of important improvements to the design of the module, but they were not enough to ensure a safe landing of the second lander on the Moon.
Image source: NASA
The Athena module managed to transmit several images of the surrounding lunar landscape to Earth before its batteries ran out. Now these images have been supplemented by orbital images of its “crater grave” taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). On March 7, LRO photographed the overturned device and its landing site, located about 160 kilometers from the south pole of the Moon. Three days later, the probe took another image, which shows the Athena module in detail on the shadowed floor of a crater about 20 meters wide.
Image source: NASA
Intuitive Machines engineers knew there was a high degree of risk in attempting a landing in this region. “This region of the south pole is exposed to the Sun at an acute angle and has limited direct communications with Earth,” the company said in a press release. “This area has been avoided due to its rugged terrain, and Intuitive Machines believes that the ideas and advances of IM-2 will open this region up to further space exploration.”
Image source: Intuitive Machines
The Athena mission, known as IM-2, was declared complete within 24 hours. The MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) rover was unable to escape from its side-slumped descent module. There is no word on the fate of the second rover, Grace. It is possible that it did not survive the flight or landing.
Athena reached the lunar surface just four days after Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander touched down in the moon’s northern hemisphere. LRO, which has been studying the moon from orbit since 2009, also took photos of Blue Ghost. Blue Ghost is currently in good working order and will continue to operate until March 16, when it will have to endure the lunar night.