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.
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