Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander is useless, simply sooner or later after it touched down on the moon’s south pole and tipped over. Fortunately, the corporate says it was capable of “speed up a number of program and payload milestones” and deploy just a few of the experiments that have been driving shotgun earlier than Athena’s lander ran out of juice.
The short finish to the Athena mission marks the second time in a row that Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the moon solely to have the mission go fairly actually sideways. The corporate’s Odysseus spacecraft touched down after which tipped over final February.
The troublesome Athena mission comes months after NASA tapped Intuitive Machines to assist develop a lunar communications system in a contract that could possibly be price as a lot as $4.8 billion (although simply $150 million of that’s assured).
The corporate stated that the orientation of Athena’s photo voltaic panels, mixed with the course of the solar and the acute chilly temperatures of the crater the place it landed, means the spacecraft can’t recharge its batteries. “The mission has concluded and groups are persevering with to evaluate the information collected all through the mission,” the corporate wrote in an update Friday.
Intuitive Machines says it was capable of get NASA’s Polar Assets Ice Mining Experiment deployed. That experiment accommodates a drill that may penetrate as much as three toes into the moon’s floor. The corporate didn’t make clear what different experiments it was capable of deploy, nevertheless it was carrying a rover with Nokia mobile know-how and a solid-state “lunar data center,” amongst others.
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