The day after landing on the moon, Athena’s robotic spacecraft built by Houston’s intuitive machinery is dead.
In an update on its website on Friday, the company confirmed that Athena was suspended on her side – the same fate that caused her first lunar Lander, Odysseus, last year. With his solar collectors who cannot deal with the sun, the batteries of the spacecraft could not recharge.
The company said it did not expect the spacecraft to revive.
Prior to the silence of the spacecraft, he stated that “the shipping auditors were able to accelerate various milestones of program and beneficial loads”.
On Friday afternoon, NASA said that some of its beneficial loads were able to activate and send back data before Lander stopped working. The mission had to last 10 days until the dark of the lunar night fell over this part of the moon.
The mission was part of a NASA program known as Lunar Lunar Merchant Services or CLPS to contract private companies to transfer scientific media and technological demonstrations to the moon at a lower cost. Another robotic spacecraft that is part of the CLPS, the Blue Ghost Lander from Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace, Texas, touched Sunday and conducts science experiments in another part of the moon.
Athena landed on Thursday on a mountain with a flat top called Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the south pole of the Moon. It was the southernmost landing area of ​​any spacecraft.
The spacecraft reached about 800 feet from the targeted landing area, the company said.
Athena brought beneficial loads for NASA and commercial customers, including three Rovers, an aircraft powered by rockets and a drill intended to push into lunar soil in search of ice water.
Shortly after the landing, it became clear that the spacecraft did not work as expected.
At a press conference after the landing, Steve Altemus, the CEO of the intuitive machines, depicted the tests with positive light. “Every time you send a spacecraft to Florida for flight and end up a week later that operates on the moon, I declare that a success,” he said.
Investors do not seem to agree. The shares of Intuitive Machines, a company trading company, decreased by 20 % on Thursday and continued to decline at the beginning of the negotiation on Friday. At noon on Friday, the company’s stock was negotiated below $ 9, out of more than $ 13 when the stock market opened on Thursday.
Nicola Fox, a NASA Science Shipment Partner, also tried to put a positive rotation in the discouraging results. “Our goal is to set US companies to create a lunar economy on the surface,” he said. “And that means that even if it doesn’t land perfectly, we always learn lessons that we can provide and use in the future.”
But Athena’s quick death again raises questions about the health of NASA’s strategy.
So far four CLPS missions have begun. Only the landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Spacecraft Sunday seems to be a complete success. The two stadiums that sent intuitive machines landed in operation, but were overthrown and failed to achieve most of their science goals.
Pittsburgh’s fourth CLPs mission, lost the moon entirely last year, when the spacecraft of its spacecraft was shortly after the launch of its spacecraft.
“You really hope that there are at least two successful companies,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, who preceded Dr. Fox as head of the Science Directorate and created CLPS in 2017. “I hope it’s more.”
But Dr. Zurbuchen has said from the beginning that half of the missions will fail, as the companies have understood how to take smart risks to building cheaper spacecraft.
The almost impeccable success of the Blue Ghost shows that lunar missions at cheaper prices are feasible. NASA paid $ 101 million to Firefly to deliver $ 44 million worth of sciences.
For Athena, NASA has agreed to pay $ 62.5 million for the delivery service to Mons Mouton. The interaction of business relations between Athena’s beneficial loads suggests that the goal of pushing a profitable lunar economy is not entirely fantastic.
Nokia, for example, had won a NASA contract for the development of a LTE 4G mobile network on the moon. Nokia then hired a company, Golden’s lunar prison, Colo, to build a Rover that will carry a mobile antenna varies from Athena Lander as part of the technology tests, which will provide upgrade from Radio UHF for lunar communications.
The lunar prison then sold space on its runner to other commercial customers.
In a statement, Nokia said its system was successfully activated after landing and worked for about 25 minutes.
“Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cell call to the moon due to players beyond our control that led to extreme cold temperatures in the modules of our user devices,” the statement said.
If CLPS deliveries continue to fail, commercial companies and NASA may convert more packages.
One of NASA’s key instruments transported by Athena was a drill made by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. The drill was turned on and was able to prove that it would have worked, NASA said.
An instrument for measuring water and other vapors of other chemical compounds on lunar soil also worked, possibly detecting elements in the exhaust from Athena’s propulsion system, NASA said.
Interest in the moon was rekindled two decades ago after discovering frozen water in shadowy craters near the poles. By analyzing the soil and rock up to three feet below the surface, NASA hoped to get a new picture of how much water is actually there and how easily it could dig and be used by future astronauts.
But now NASA will have to decide whether to spend millions of dollars more about another drill to gather this information.
NASA already holds an identical drill that is installed on the volatile exploration of the Polar Exploration Rover or Viper. The golf -sized Rover was also landed on Mons Mouton on Astrobotic’s next CLPS mission. But the space service announced last year that it wanted to cancel Viper, although it had already spent $ 450 million and the construction and Rover’s tests were almost complete.
Since then, the Space Agency has called on companies for proposals to send the Rover to the moon at no extra cost for NASA.
Danielle Kaye They contributed reports.
