Intuitive machines won a second space vessel on the moon, just a year after having accomplished the feat for the first time. Unfortunately, just like this first attempt, it seems that the company’s spaceship may have turned to the side.
The Lunar Landder, called Athena, approached the surface of the moon around 12:30 p.m. Thursday. It is the second private spaceship to land on the moon this week, after Blue Ghost of Firefly Aerospace approached March 2.
The director of intuitive machines technology said in a press conference after the landing that Athena is somewhere inside the 50 -meter landing area on Mons Mouton, a flat roof mountain on the southern pole of the moon. But he said that the company was still working to determine where exactly Athena had attracted.
The CEO, Steve Altemus, added at the conference that the company does not think that Atena is at “the correct attitude” – space flights speak for “it has probably overturned”.
Altemus has otherwise praised the mission, which, according to him, took place much more easily than last year’s trip to the moon.
The rest of Athena’s mission is now at stake. The spacecraft, which has taken off for the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 26, transports a number of technologies that intuitive machines hoped.
One is a passive laser retro -retroreflector network that intuitive machines hope to use to communicate with other incoming or orbit spaces. It is a crucial technology for NASA hopes to build a permanent moon base – so much so that the space agency awarded intuitive machines a contract of $ 4.8 billion At the end of last year to build the communication system. (Only $ 150 million is guaranteed.)
Athena also offers an ice extraction experience for NASA, which the agency had hoped to use to determine if there are enough natural resources on the moon to one day fuel or breathable oxygen.
The additional useful loads include a rover called MAPP which is supposed to test the cellular equipment of Nokia, and Semiconductor storage Presented as the first “lunar data center”.
