Posted on 03/07/2025 6:48:21 AM PST by Red Badger
The second lunar lander made by Intuitive Machines has touched down on the Moon, but like the private aerospace company’s first spacecraft, it may not be upright. The Athena vehicle for Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission landed yesterday just 100 miles from the lunar south pole, but there’s uncertainty around its orientation which may impact the mission’s duration.
“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude on the surface of the Moon yet again,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during the post-landing news conference.“We’re going to get a picture from the lunar reconnaissance orbital camera from above and we’ll confirm that over the coming days.”
Data from Athena’s Inertial Measurement Unit indicates that “we’re oriented somewhat on our side,” according to Altemus. Odysseus, a near-identical Intuitive Machines lander that became the first privately owned spacecraft to reach the Moon’s surface last year, shared a similar fate when it toppled over during its own landing. Athena touched down just a few days after the Blue Ghost private lander created by Firefly Aerospace, which landed “in an upright, stable configuration” on March 2nd.
The IM-2 mission is part of Intuitive Machines’ partnership with NASA to help return future crewed missions to the Moon. Athena was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 26th, and carries 11 payloads and scientific instruments designed to find evidence of water on the lunar surface.
The Athena lander is charging on the surface according to Altemus and is communicating with the mission ground network team on Earth, but performance is sub-optimal, which may cut Athena’s ten-day lifespan short. “We have done some power conservation steps as prudent measures to see how long and what objectives we can accomplish in the mission going forward,” said Altemus. “It will be off-nominal, because we’re not getting everything that we had asked for in terms of power generation, communications.”
Once the orientation of the lander is confirmed, the IM-2 team can then establish how many of Athena’s payloads and scientific instruments are fully operational — including a drill designed to search for ice, and a hopping drone vehicle named Grace that aims to explore a permanently shadowed crater for the first time.
¡¡¡¡¡פNIԀ
Gotta put it in a gimble or something. Live and learn. Maybe a sphere
Elon needs to get that upper ship section operational so we can go fix some of this stuff on the Moon...
They should use a better parachute.
How Is That Possible?
The center of gravity of the craft is too high, the legs are too springy and the lander bounces when it touches down.
I wonder if the engineers took into consideration that the Moon’s gravity is only 1/6th that of the Earth?.....................
Build it like a Weebil. Weebils wobble, but they can’t fall down.
“Once the orientation of the lander is confirmed”
Uh, just look at the picture above!! I can confirm it is on it’s side.
Those feet make it look like a converted pop-up lawn chair.
Everything about that lander had to be structured for lower gravity, if only to save overall weight. The craft has to be designed to accommodate a very unpredictable surface and remain upright with irregular objects tipping or skipping out from under its feet. When astronauts landed the LEM, they had decisionmaking within feet of the surface, to reposition if necessary. I'm betting that designing an intelligent system for a lander to do that job onboard is very difficult. Given the distance, the communication loop to earth for control purposes would be pretty slow.
That is Out of This World Tech
Right There!
Crap! I knew we forgot something. 🚀🤔
Is it the biden edition lander?
Better if someone would simply build a large, flat landing field on he moon. Probably in Elon’s plans for the future.
Maybe they should contract with some of the engineers that worked on the Blue Ghost lander. It seems to have made it on its first try, a few days back.
Oooh... at last, internet technology has caught up, I can start my Land Down Under ping list!!!
Did you know that the first U.S. robot to successfully land on the Moon was Surveyor 1? It touched down on June 2, 1966. (I was turning 15 and was awed by it, especially since Dad was leading spacecraft design projects at the time)
Surveyor 1 landed in the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms), a vast lunar plain, and transmitted over 11,000 images back to Earth, along with data on soil mechanics and surface conditions. Surveyor 1 achieved a controlled landing using retrorockets, marking a significant milestone in American lunar exploration. This was the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon, beating the Soviet Union's Luna 9 (February 3, 1966) as the first ever robotic soft landing, but establishing the U.S. as a key player in lunar surface operations.
The contract for Surveyor was awarded by JPL to Hughes in 1961. Detailed design and development of Surveyor 1 occurred between 1962 and 1964. Final assembly and testing was completed by early 1966.
The Radar Altimeter and Doppler Velocity Sensor systems were activated at ~8 miles altitude after main retrorocket separation. It measured altitude and three-axis velocity (vertical and lateral), feeding real-time data to the flight control system. The Central Computer and Sequencer was a rudimentary onboard computer that processed radar data and issued commands to the propulsion systems. It lacked modern digital processing but used analog logic and preprogrammed sequences, with some real-time adjustments. Gyroscopes and accelerometers maintained orientation, working with nitrogen-gas jets (cold-gas thrusters) for attitude control during coast phases and descent.
And it did not fall over.
The SIXTIETH anniversary of that landing is coming up in 2026.
Yes, space is hard, but look what American engineers did over 60 years ago without modern digital electronic control systems!
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