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The Athena robotic spacecraft has touched down on the lunar surface in the second moon landing for the US space company Intuitive Machines in little more than a year.
The nearly 5 metre tall probe set down shortly after 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, flight controllers struggled to confirm the lander’s status and its orientation on the rugged terrain.
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.
The company’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first private mission to reach the moon in February 2024, 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.
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 ahead 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, the largest being the mobile autonomous prospecting platform, or Mapp, which holds equipment from Nokia to test a cellular network on the moon. It is intended to allow communications between the lander, the rover and a rocket-fuelled drone called Grace, which is designed to fly into a shaded crater and take measurements. But all depends on whether the lander is operational.
If Athena is working 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.
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. Armed with the map, astronomers hope to learn about the origins of water and other ingredients for life in the Milky Way and answer questions about the large-scale structure of the universe, which expanded a trillion trillion times in a fraction of a second after the big bang.
