Intuitive Machines’ Athena ships are not as expected and the responsible team is still looking for the cause.
Photos taken from Athena during the landing process on March 6. Image: It’s on TV
The second moon landing ship of Intuitive Machines named Athena landed in Monson Mouton region of the Moon’s pole at 12h31 on 6/3 (23h31 and the same time and time in Hanoi), according to Space. However, this is not the perfect landing. While Athena still transmits data on the Earth and produces electricity on the moon surface, the spacecraft does not seem to land vertically as expected. “We do not think the train is in the right posture on the moon surface,” CEO Steve Altemus of IntuTive Machines said.
Intuitive Machines became the first private company to land on the moon last year with Odysseus spacecraft. Odysseus rushed down too quickly when landing in February 2024, broken one leg and poured to one side, hindering the ability to contact the Earth of the ship. Although more data needed to determine the situation, obviously the same thing happened to the Athena ship, according to Altemus.
The 4 -meter -high Athena ship on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on February 26. The IM-2 mission of this amphibious ship is funded by the NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, in order to transport their scientific and technological equipment by private ships. NASA ordered goods on the Athena train for $ 62.5 million. The goal is to collect data on the moon environment at a cost of saving before the astronauts fly to the Artemis program. It is expected that they will land near the south pole in 2027 and set one or more bases in the region.
The southernmost moon is very suitable for placing people. This area is said to contain a lot of water bandages, especially in the pit, permanently obscured. The ice accumulated in these cold pit mouths for billions of years. Mons Mouton is only 160 km from the southernmost moon, closer to any other spacecraft that has ever landed. If all follows the plan, the IM-2 will help researchers to evaluate the size and accessibility of the area in the area, which can be used as drinking water or splitting into hydrogen and oxygen to produce rocket push fuel.
An important block of Athena is the experiment of exploiting the extreme ice resource (Prime-1). Prime-1 consists of a drill designed to get the moon dust from a depth of 0.9 m under the ground and the universal block helps find signs of water bandages and many other interesting compounds in the object. According to Jackie Quinn, Prime-1 Project Manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, this is a key step towards understanding and exploiting Moon resources to support future exploration.
Athena also carried another 35 kg spacecraft manufactured by Intuitive Machines called Grace in mathematicians and computer science Grace Hopper. If the task of IM-2 smoothly, the small ship model will be deployed from Athena, then explore the area around the landing position, launched from place to place by push motor. Grace will approach the pit’s mouth that is permanently obscured, where the self -propelled robot has ever been.
Grace is not the only robot to fly thanks to the moon surface on the Athena ship. The amphibious ship also carries a small self -propelled robot called Mapp (Mobile Autonomous Prospection Platform) made by Lunar Outpost Company in Colorado. Mapp equipped with heat camera and high -resolution optical camera. It also carries a separate robot named Astrant, extremely small prototype developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Astrant will attach to the upper part of the mapp thanks to 4 magnetic wheels.
Athena, Grace and Mapp will keep in touch with each other by Nokia’s lunar surface. This device will set the first 4G/LTE network on the moon. In addition, Athena also carries 498 g Yaoki robots of Japanese company Dymon.
It is expected that the IM-2 mission will last 10 days and end when the sun sets in the Mons Mouton region, making the Athena ship unable to continue producing solar energy. The representative of Intuitive Machines said it was too early to determine whether the goods were affected by the abnormal landing of the ship. They will conclude after understanding the direction of the Athena ship.