The Athena lander reached the moon – but seems to have fallen over

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

The spacecraft launched onboard 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 the landing wasn’t entirely successful and its precise location or orientation on the lunar surface is 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: the Odysseus spacecraft. It marked first time that a private firm had landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over onto its side and was not 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 the IM-2 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 meters. 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, and 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 to figure out which of the instruments will be able to accomplish some of their scientific goals, said Altemus.

This is part of a broader push for increased exploration in 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.