For the second time this week, a privately operated spacecraft has touched down on the Moon – but this one landed badly.
The Athena lander, built by Texas startup Intuitive Machines, set down at 1730 UTC Thursday in the Mons Mouton region just 160 km (100 miles) from the South Pole of the Moon. The spacecraft’s internal sensors indicated that it may horizontal, and not vertical as intended.
“We had a seven-day transit to the surface and we think that we’ve been very successful to this point,” CEO Steve Altemus said at a press conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“However I do have to tell you that we don’t believe we’re on the correct attitude on the surface, yet again. I don’t have all the data yet to say exactly what the attitude of the vehicle is – we’re collecting photos now.”
That “yet again” refers to the fate of Intuitive Machines’ first lander, Odysseus, which last year landed on the Moon but tipped over after descending too quickly and breaking a leg. Unable to charge its solar panels, the spacecraft shut down.
Some have criticized the design choices made by Intuitive Machines for its spacecraft. Most lunar landers use squat designs to achieve great stability, but Athena is over 4.5 metres (15 feet) tall and just 1.57 metres (5.1 feet) wide.
The Athena lander in happier times, standing upright as intended albeit on Earth … Click to enlarge. Source: Intuitive Machines
At his press conference earlier today, Altemus defended the design, saying the spacecraft doesn’t have a high center of gravity because most of its cargo attaches to the base of the vehicle. He said there were no plans for a radical rethink of his company’s design.
Any time humanity puts a lander on the Moon, it’s a good day
One good sign is that the spacecraft is still generating power, although not enough for normal operations. The flight team are investigating which systems can be shut down to ensure the longest possible working life for the lander, and we’re told they remain upbeat.
“Any time humanity puts a lander on the Moon, it’s a good day,” said Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer.
It’s just a better day when they land fully operational, as happened last Sunday when Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander touched down safely. Blue Ghost carried 10 instruments for NASA to the Moon and has already started sending back selfies and data from our natural satellite.
Experimentation botheration
While the state of the Athena lander is determined, numerous boffins will ponder what will become of its cargo, which included three lunar rovers and lots of other scientific equipment.
One of Athena’s payloads is NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1, which was designed to drill down into the regolith and analyze the drilled cores for signs of water. It’s thought the Moon’s South Pole has water in deep, dark craters. Lunar soil may also contain H2O. At the press conference, NASA said that, depending on the lander’s angle, it may still be possible to analyze regolith on the surface.
The second NASA instrument aboard Athena is the Laser Retro-reflector array (LRA), a domed unit studded with mirrors that can be used to reflect laser light. These are used to determine the precise position of satellites and objects on the ground, and NASA’s been leaving them on the Moon since the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
The lander also had commercial packages, including Intuitive Machines’ own Micro Nova Hopper, nicknamed Grace after the legendary coder. The hopper is designed to, well, hop in and out of craters within 25 kilometres (15 miles) of the landing site using jet propulsion and check them for signs of water.
The hopper-slash-rover carries the German Aerospace Center’s Lunar Radiometer (LRAD) to help its search for water.
Grace ideally will communicate with Athena using the Moon’s first mobile network. Nokia has designed and built a 4G/LTE base station as a test bed for a large communications grid planned for use when humans next arrive.
Nokia’s network will also, fingers crossed, connect a more conventional four-wheeled rover Athena carried, called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP).
MAPP was designed to explore the terrain and has an advanced suspension system to handle the bumpy lunar surface. It was supposed to assess the difficulty astronauts could face when traveling on the surface. The rover also carried a payload called AstroAnt, a swarm of miniature robots built at MIT and designed to measure temperature on the top of MAPP, as you can see below.
The third rover aboard Athena is a Japanese creation named Yaoki that is just 15 cm (six inches) long and wide, and 10 cm (four inches) tall. The two-wheeled probe has got to be the smallest rover yet on the Moon and is exspected to roam about taking closeup shots of the surface. This rover probably has the best chance of being used since it is designed to be dropped anywhere and can then orient itself.
The Intuitive Machines team is working to understand which payloads can be deployed given the state of it all. The good news is that all the cargo is awake and communicating. Hopefully some of them can be used and data will be collected, since the Mons Mouton highlands is considered a prime landing spot for future manned missions. ®