Intuitive Machines: Athena lander reached the moon – but seems to have fallen over

Intuitive Machines’s Athena lander has made it to the moon, but it seems to have fallen over. The lander is still working, but it isn’t yet clear which parts of its mission it will still be able to accomplish.

The spacecraft launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 27 February. It landed on 6 March, but this wasn’t entirely successful and its precise location and orientation on the lunar surface are still unclear.

“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude on the surface of the moon, yet again,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus in a press conference shortly after the landing. This is a similar result to the company’s last attempt to land on the moon with its Odysseus spacecraft. That marked the first time that a private firm had landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over onto its side and wasn’t able to send back much data.

Athena has a variety of scientific instruments, but perhaps the most important of these is The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT), a NASA experiment designed to drill up to a metre through the lunar soil. It is intended to take samples from underground and analyse their contents, looking for water ice and other chemical compounds.

“This experiment marks a significant milestone, as it will be the first robotic drilling activity conducted in the moon’s south pole region,” said Jacqueline Quinn at KSC in a 25 February press conference. If TRIDENT does still work, “it’s a crucial step towards understanding and harnessing lunar resources to support future exploration”, she said.

As part of its mission, Athena carried several rovers with it to the moon. One of them, nicknamed Grace after computer scientist and mathematician Grace Hopper, is designed to jump around the surface unlike any rover that has come before it, firing small boosters to jump up to 100 metres into the air and travel a distance of around 200 metres. Grace is intended to explore the moon’s strange, permanently shadowed craters.

Athena’s operators have been able to send the craft commands and turn it and its scientific payloads on and off, as well as downlink some data back to Earth. The solar panels are also functioning to charge up the lander’s electronics. That seems to be good news, but the team is still working out which of the instruments will be able to accomplish their scientific goals, said Altemus.

This mission is part of a broader push for increased exploration of the moon, partly in preparation for planned human missions over the course of the next decade. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander just made it to the moon on 2 March, and the Resilience lander from Japanese company ispace is en route.