The Athena robotic spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface on Thursday in the second moon landing for the US space company Intuitive Machines in little more than a year.
An as-yet-undiagnosed problem following its descent, however, left the craft at “an incorrect attitude”, with mission managers telling an afternoon press conference that they were unable to predict to what extent the operation of Athena and its various payloads will be affected.
In February 2024, the company’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first private mission to reach the moon, but the probe skidded across the surface, broke a leg and toppled over. Athena has the same tall, thin design that some experts fear makes it prone to falling over.
On Thursday, Steve Altemus, chief executive of Texas-based Intuitive Machines, suggested that a similar fate might have befallen Athena, but that engineers needed more data to be certain of whether it had come to rest on its side.
“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude on the surface of the Moon, yet again,” he told reporters.
“We are charging on the surface. We have command of uplink and downlink from the vehicle to our ground network … so we are communicating. We have powered down and done some power conservation steps as prudent measures to see how long and what objectives we can accomplish in the mission.
“When we get that full assessment, we will work closely with Nasa to identify science objectives that are the highest priority, and we’ll figure out what the mission profile will look like. It will be off nominal, because we’re not getting everything that we had asked for in terms of power generation, communications.”
The nearly 5-metre-tall probe set down shortly after 12.30pm ET (5.30pm UK time) on Thursday after a tense descent to Mons Mouton, a high and relatively flat mountain about 100 miles from the moon’s south pole.
But while Athena sent back data and began to charge its batteries on the surface, it soon became apparent that its orientation on the rugged terrain was not as expected.
As engineers in Houston peered at the lander’s data for clues, Tim Crain, the mission director, urged his team to “keep working the problem”, an acknowledgment that all was not well. “We’re shedding power as fast as we can to keep the vehicle in good health. We are generating power. We are communicating through our telemetry radio, and we are working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface,” he said.
Athena is one of 10 missions contracted by Nasa’s $2.6bn commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) programme to encourage private industry to fly experiments and other equipment to the moon in advance of humans returning before the end of the decade. Under Nasa’s Artemis programme, the US intends to put the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon in mid-2027.
On Sunday, another robotic lander funded by CLPS touched down on the moon in the most successful private landing yet. Built and operated by Firefly Aerospace, also in Texas, the Blue Ghost lander settled in Mare Crisium, a 300-mile-wide impact basin filled with frozen lava.
The Athena probe is thought to have landed closer to the south pole than any previous lunar mission. The south pole is attractive for human exploration as its permanently shaded craters harbour frozen water that would be crucial for visiting astronauts.
One of Athena’s key objectives is to deploy Nasa’s Trident drill to dig beneath the moon’s surface. Any soil it excavates will be analysed by a mass spectrometer to detect essential constituents such as water.
The lander carries three robotic rovers, with gear to test a cellular network on the moon, depending on whether the lander is operational.
If Athena works properly, it may join Blue Ghost in witnessing a lunar eclipse as the Earth moves between the moon and the sun on 14 March. Days later, the sun will set on the moon and both probes will shut down.
Mapp, developed by the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost, is the first commercial rover to land on the moon. Among the mission’s objectives is the “sale” to Nasa for a symbolic $1 of a small sample of rocky lunar regolith recovered by the rover.
The transaction, which will mark the first time a section of a planetary body has changed hands for money, is intended to set an important legal precedent for future space commerce, according to Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost.
“Lunar Voyage 1 is not just about exploration, it’s about proving that private industry can operate, sustain and create economic value on the moon,” he said ahead of the mission’s 26 February launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Nasa is preparing to launch two missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The SPHEREx and Punch spacecraft are due to blast off on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 3.09am UK time on Saturday.
The Punch mission will deploy four suitcase-sized satellites to map the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, to understand the solar wind, the stream of plasma that flows from our parent star.
Meanwhile, SPHEREx will observe hundreds of millions of galaxies and other objects to create an infrared map of the cosmos.
Overall, Nasa’s moon missions face an uncertain future with speculation that its own Space Launch System rocket programme could be canceled in favor of heavy-lift Starship rockets developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and the reported laying off of 10% of the space agency’s workforce through Trump administration cuts ordered by Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.
