The Athena lunar lander (IM-2) has been declared lifeless after it failed to stay the touchdown on the floor of the Moon. The second business lander launched by Texas-based aerospace firm Intuitive Machines tried to achieve the lunar floor on March sixth. Nevertheless, it ended up in a crater close to the lunar south pole, the place it then fell on its facet. The corporate confirmed that the mission was lifeless this morning in a press release.
Per that assertion, Intuitive Machines declared that whereas the lander was not operational, the mission was not a complete write-off:
“[T]he IM-2 mission lunar lander, Athena, landed 250 meters from its meant touchdown website within the Mons Mouton area of the lunar south pole, within a crater. This was the southernmost lunar touchdown and floor operations ever achieved. Photographs downlinked from Athena on the lunar floor confirmed that Athena was on her facet. After touchdown, mission controllers had been capable of speed up a number of program and payload milestones, together with NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, earlier than the lander’s batteries depleted.”
“With the path of the solar, the orientation of the photo voltaic panels, and excessive chilly temperatures within the crater, Intuitive Machines doesn’t count on Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and groups are persevering with to evaluate the information collected all through the mission.”
The lander launched on February twenty seventh, 2025, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complicated 39A (LC39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Area Middle. The payload consists of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1), which consists of the TRIDENT Drill and MSolo mass spectrometer, designed to probe as much as one meter (3.3 ft) beneath the lunar floor to seek for volatiles like water and carbon dioxide (CO2) – that are essential to the Artemis Program and NASA’s proposed crewed missions to the Moon.
In response to NASA, mission controllers did handle to activate Trident and rotate the drill to show it labored whereas a companion science instrument collected some information. Intuitive Machines additionally said that a number of different mission goals had been accelerated. Athena’s different payloads embrace Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper (aka. Grace), which is designed to discover craters as much as 2 km (1.24 mi) from the lander.
It additionally carried the Nokia Lunar Surface Communications System (LSCS), a 4G/LTE system to check high-speed, long-range communications. These and different payloads had been despatched as a part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which has contracted with a number of U.S. corporations to ship science and know-how experiments to the lunar floor. Whereas Grace and two rovers offered by personal corporations didn’t make it off the lander and discover the South Pole-Aitken Basin as deliberate, Intuitive Machines confirmed that they had been capable of activate these and different science experiments earlier than the lander misplaced energy.
The IM-2 mission joins its predecessor, the Odysseus mission (IM-1), which tried to land on the lunar floor final yr but in addition fell on its facet shortly after touching down. In each instances, the issue was attributed to a last-minute failure with the lander’s prime laser navigation system. Nevertheless, IM-1 was the primary NASA mission to land on the Moon because the Apollo 17 mission over 50 years in the past. This time, the lander additionally survived longer earlier than its batteries misplaced energy. The IM-2 lander additionally has the excellence of getting nearer to the Moon’s south pole than any earlier mission, touchdown simply 160 km (100 mi) away.
On March 2nd, Firefly Aerospace efficiently reached the northern hemisphere on the Moon’s close to facet with its Blue Ghost lander. As a part of the CLPS initiative, this mission carried 10 NASA experiments and is predicted to stay operational for one more week till lunar night time descends and it might not draw energy from its photo voltaic panels.
In the meantime, Intuitive Machines is contracted to ship two NASA payloads to the Moon with their IM-3 and IM-4 landers. These missions are reportedly scheduled to launch no ahead of late October 2025 and 2027, respectively.
