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Moon

Dead Athena Moon Lander Seen Inside Its Crater Grave From Lunar Orbit (space.com) 26

Posted by BeauHD from the tipsy-robots dept.
From a Space.com article: Athena, the second lunar lander from Houston company Intuitive Machines, tipped over during its touchdown on March 6, ending up on its side within a small crater near the moon's south pole. This orientation prevented the lander's solar panels from capturing enough sunlight, and Intuitive Machines declared Athena dead on March 7. (The company's first moon lander, named Odysseus, also tipped over during its historic February 2024 touchdown but was able to operate for longer on the lunar surface.)

Athena beamed home a few shots of its surroundings before giving up the ghost. And we now have views of the lander and its crater grave from on high, courtesy of NASA's sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). On March 7, LRO captured a gorgeous oblique photo of Athena and its landing site -- the Mons Mouton region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the lunar south pole. Then, three days later, the probe snapped another pic, which provided a closer look at Athena on the shadowed floor of a 65-foot-wide (20 meters) crater.

Dead Athena Moon Lander Seen Inside Its Crater Grave From Lunar Orbit More | Reply

Dead Athena Moon Lander Seen Inside Its Crater Grave From Lunar Orbit

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  • I hope they have the resources to try again, hopefully with an approach that offer much less chance of tipping.

  • There are probably multiple reasons for the failure.
    1. Touchdown while there still was a horizontal movement.
    2. Insufficient surveying for a good landing spot.
    3. Too high center of gravity on the probe relative to the spread of the support legs.

    In the end it comes down to trying to make it cheap.

    • Plus the repeated problems with the altimeter. After the first time, there was really no excuse for the second failure.

      Still, it's nice to have commercial efforts.

    • To me it looks like it landed on the side of a crater.

    • 4. No current automated system could land on an uneven surface with multiple craters in the landing zone.
      • They need Tesla's Full Self Landing (available any day now) to make it so. Of course, it'll explode into a fireball on impact, but they'll count that as a successful landing, anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Swervin ( 836962 )
        This could be solved by deploying Weeble technology, then the lander could wobble, but not fall down. In other words, round the bottom, mount batteries low, then it will be self-righting (with no power even!).

  • RIP (Score:1)

    by BinBoy ( 164798 )

    o7

  • It feels like a fraud. They are doing it second time, as I heard, and fail the same way.

    Sending a vertical tower to another planet with a soft dusty surface and expect it to stand vertically, even though it had already tipped over before... I am not sure what to say. Probably, they need to try that again.

    On the other hand, if it is an empty shell, and was never expected to survive... That could make a nice money laundering scheme..

    • Basic investigation and cross check with supplier sales would reveal the fraud. Plus Intuitive Machines has too many employees to keep that big a scam. They'd need to have made sure everyone they hired was going to not figure out the fraud or whistleblow. Even a basic investigation would cause the whole thing to unravel.

  • Next time just ask them to TRY to land one on its side. That should fix the problem.

  • Even with the arrow pointing at it in the first picture I see nothing there.

    • Even with the arrow pointing at it in the first picture I see nothing there.

      Yeah, I thought something similar at first. Our takeaway from the photo is that the amorphous blob is the lander inside a crater. That much we can tell. But we can't see enough to actually tell that it's on its side. That's simply a guess based on that lander's inability to communicate any more.

      • >That's simply a guess based on that lander's inability to communicate any more.

        It's also based on this image [space.com] taken by the lander as it lay on its side. Scott Manly made a great video [youtube.com] on the topic.
  • Dispatch errand boy Elon and his Rocket to bring back it's body!

  • Now, if these people would actually do solid engineering...
    Apparently that is not how ro do it anymore.

  • They should've used Weebles as a design guide, because everyone knows Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. Now get off my lawn.

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