It’s a haunting photo, but at least it has answers: For the second time in as many years, a private Intuitive Machines lunar lander has tipped over on the moon.
After a day of uncertainty following a harrowing moon landing attempt, the company Intuitive Machines sealed the fate of its latest lunar probe Athena. The spacecraft, which attempted a historic landing in rugged terrain near the south pole of the moon on Thursday (March 6), had toppled on its side inside a frigid crater.
A photo taken by the Athena lander on the moon showed as much. It looked toward Earth, shining blue and half-lit over the moon’s horizon, which was canted to the right as two of the Athena lander’s legs jutted into the sky after its touchdown in the Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole. With the lander unable to generate power, Intuitive Machines declared its mission over.
“With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,” the company wrote in an update Friday. “The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.”
Still, the company celebrated the fact that Athena touched down where it did. “This was the southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved.”
NASA officials, in a separate update, stated that the Intuitive Machines lander touched down about 1,300 feet (400 meters) from its intended landing site. “Our targeted landing site near the lunar South Pole is one of the most scientifically interesting, and geographically challenging locations, on the moon,” NASA associate administrator for science Nicky Fox said in the statement.
It marked an ignominous end for Athena and Intuitive’s Machine’s IM-2 mission, the second lunar landing attempt by the Houston-based company. Its first moon landing on the IM-1 mission last year also tipped over when one of its Odysseus probe’s four landing legs broke after hit the lunar surface faster than expected.
For IM-2, Intuitive Machines added additional cameras and other guidance and navigation upgrades to Athena, along with some ambitious payloads. The lander carried two small rovers, a Nokia 4G communications system, a hopping robot called Grace and an ice-hunting drill for NASA called PRIME-1. The $62.5 million mission marked the second by Intuitive Machines for NASA under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payloads Services, or CLPS, program.
“After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted,” Intuitive Machines said in its update.
NASA officials said the Athena lander’s orientation on its side prevented it “from fully operating the drill and other instruments before its batteries were depleted,” but the PRIME-1 drill “successfully demonstrated the hardware’s full range of motion in the harsh environment of space.” A mass spectrometer that was included in the PRIME-1 instrument suite also detected some gases that were likely emitted by the lander’s engine during landing.
“While this mission didn’t achieve all of its objectives for NASA, the work that went into the payload development is already informing other agency and commercial efforts,” Clayton Turner, NASA’s associate administrator for space technology, said in the agency’s statement. “As we continue developing new technologies to support exploration of the moon and Mars, testing technologies in-situ is crucial to informing future missions.”
During a press conference after Athena’s lunar landing on Thursday, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said he still considered the attempt “a success” in that it reached the moon and operated, if only for a bit, a week after launching from Earth atop a SpaceX rocket. He said the company will take what it learns from IM-2 and apply it to its next moon mission, IM-3, in 2026. The company also has a $117 million NASA contract for a fourth flight in 2027.
Both Intuitive Machines and NASA stressed that the rugged nature of south pole region of the moon, with its harsh sunlight angles and fifficulty to reach, made it a particularly new challenge for a moon landing. There was also “limited direct communications” with Earth to add to the mix.
“It’s this twilight space of shadows and grays that it was interesting,” Tim Crain, chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, said of the crater lighting during Athena’s descent. “I’m really proud of how well our crater tracking system did in this very unusual lighting condition. So, we’ll get it next time.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8 p.m. ET to include comments from NASA on the end of Intuitive Machines’ Athena moon landing mission.