A second spacecraft for intuitive machines just landed on the moon – and probably turned over

Intuitive machines have landed a second spacecraft on the moon just one year after reaching the feat for for the first timeS Unfortunately, very much like this first attempt, it seems that the company’s spacecraft may have focused on it.

Lunar land, called Athens, touched the moon’s surface around 12:30 pm on Thursday. This is the second private spacecraft that landed on the moon this week after the Firefly Aerospace blue ghost of Aerospace was touched on March 2.

The Chief Technology Director of Intuitive Machines said at a press conference after landing that Athens was somewhere in the 50-meter landing area of ​​Mons Mutton, a flat-peak mountain at the South Pole of the Moon. But he said the company was still working on determining exactly where Athens had touched.

Executive Director Steve Altem added during the conference that the company did not think Athens was in the “right attitude” – the space flight speaks of “probably transferred”.

Otherwise, Allet praised the mission that said that it had been much more hungry than last year’s trip to the moon.

The rest of Athens’ mission is now hanging in the balance. The spacecraft, which took off for the moon aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 on February 26, has brought a number of technologies that intuitive machines hoped to test.

One is a passive laser retroflectric massif that intuitive machines hope to use to communicate with other incoming or orbital spacecraft. This is a decisive technology for NASA’s hope of building a permanent lunar base – so much so that the space agency awarded intuition machines contract for $ 4.8 billion At the end of last year to build the communication system. (Only $ 150 million of this are guaranteed.)

Athens also conducts an ice production experiment for NASA, which the agency hoped to use to determine if there is enough natural moon resources to make fuel or breathable oxygen for a day.

Additional payloads include a rover called Mapp, which should test the cellular equipment from Nokia and Storage Requested as the first in the history “Center for Lunar Data”.