A day after the landing on the moon, the robot -like Athena -space vessel that is built by intuitive machines from Houston is dead.
In an update on its website on Friday, the company confirmed that Athena had tipped on its side – the same fate that happened to his first lunar lander, Odysseus last year. With its solar panels unable to face the sun, the batteries of the spacecraft could not charge.
The company said it was not expected that the spacecraft would revive.
Before the spacecraft silent, it stood: “Mission controllers could speed up different milestones and payload milestones.”
On Friday afternoon, NASA reported that some of its loads were able to switch on and return data before the lander was no longer working. The mission would last 10 days until the darkness of the moon evening fell over that part of the moon.
The mission was part of a NASA program that is known as commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPs, to contract private companies to bear scientific instruments and technological demonstrations against the Moon at lower costs. Another robot -like spacecraft that is part of CLPs, the Blue Ghost Lander of Firefly Aerospace from Cedar Park, Texas, has hit on Sunday and performs science experiments on another part of the moon.
Athena landed on Thursday on a mounted mounted mounted Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the South Pole of the Moon. It was the southernmost landing site of every spacecraft.
The spacecraft ended at about 800 feet from the intended landing site, the company said.
Athena wore payloads for NASA and commercial customers, including three robbers, a rocket-driven drone and an exercise intended to poke in the moon soil in search of water ice.
Shortly after landing it became clear that the spacecraft did not work as expected.
During a post-landing news conference, Steve Altemus, the Chief Executive of Intuitive Machines, portrayed the trials in a positive light. “Every time you send a spacecraft to Florida for flights and operate on the moon a week later, I declare that a success,” he said.
Investors don't seem to agree. Shares of Intuitive Machines, a listed company, fell by 20 percent on Thursday and continued to fall at the start of the trade on Friday. In the afternoon on Friday, the shares of the company traded less than $ 9, against more than $ 13 when the stock market was opened on Thursday.
Nicola Fox, the associated manager of NASA's directorate Science Mission, also tried to give a positive twist to the discouraging results. “Our goal is to set up American companies to establish a moon economy on the surface,” she said. “And that means that even if it doesn't land perfectly, we always learn lessons that we can give and use in the future.”
But the rapid death of Athena again raises questions about the reliability of the NASA strategy.
Four CLPS missions have been launched so far. Only the landing of Sunday of the Blue Ghost -Space Varitage by Firefly seems to be a complete success. The two people who were sent by intuitive machines both landed in the working state, but fell over and did not succeed in achieving most of their science goals.
The fourth CLPS mission, by Astrobotic Technology from Pittsburgh, completely missed the Moon last year when the propulsion system of his peregrine spacecraft was not functioning shortly after the launch.
“You really hope that there are at least two companies that are successful,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, who is Dr. FOX was the head of the Science Mission directorate and that CLPs set up in 2017. “I hope it's more.”
But Dr. From the start, Zurbuchen has said that perhaps half of the missions would fail, because companies found out how to take smart risks when building cheaper spacecraft.
The almost flawless success of Blue Ghost shows that lunar missions with cheaper price tags are possible. NASA paid $ 101 million in Firefly to deliver $ 44 million to science experiments.
For Athena, NASA agreed to pay intuitive machines $ 62.5 million for the delivery service to Mons Mouton. The interdependence of business relationships between the loads of Athena suggests that the purpose of stimulating a profitable moon economy is not entirely fantastic.
Nokia, for example, had won a NASA contract to implement a 4G LTE mobile network on the moon. Nokia then hired a company, Lunar Outpost from Golden, Colo., To build a Rover that would move a mobile antenna that would move different distances from the Athena Lander as part of the technology tests, which would offer an upgrade of UHF radio for Lunar Communications.
Lunar Outpost then sold space on his Rover to other commercial customers.
In a statement, Nokia said that his system was successfully engaged after landing and worked for about 25 minutes.
“Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the moon because of factors outside of our control that resulted in extreme cold temperatures on our user device modules,” said the explanation.
If the CLPS deliveries continue to fail, commercial companies and NASA can become suspicious of sending more packages.
One of the most important NASA instruments in Athena was an exercise built by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. The exercise was called in and could show that it would have worked, said NASA.
An instrument for measuring water and other fumes from other chemical compounds in the moon soil also worked, probably detecting elements in the exhaust plume of the Athena drive system, Nasa said.
The interest in the moon was again fueled a few decades ago after the discovery of frozen water in shadowed craters near the Poles. By analyzing soil and rock up to three feet below the surface, NASA hoped to gain new insight into how much water there is and how easily it can be excavated and used by future astronauts.
But now NASA will have to decide whether she wants to spend millions of dollars more for another exercise to collect that information.
NASA already has an identical exercise that is installed on the volatile substances that Polar Exploration Rover or Viper are investigating. The Rover of the Golf-Cart-Size was planned to land on Mons Mouton on the next CLPS mission from Astrobotic. But the space agency announced last year that the Viper wanted to cancel, although it had already spent $ 450 million and the construction and testing of the Rover were almost complete.
The Space Agency has since called companies for proposals to send the Rover to the Moon without extra costs to NASA.
Danielle Kaye contributed reporting.
