The automatic spacecraft in Athens fell on the surface of the moon in the second moon that fell to the American intuitive space company in a little more than a year.
A probe broke out nearly 5 meters after 5:30 pm in the United Kingdom on Thursday after a tense to Mons Mouton, a high mountain and a relatively flat about 100 miles from the southern pole of the moon.
But while Athens sent the data and started charging its batteries on the surface, the flying control units struggled to confirm the Lander status and directed them to the rugged terrain.
While Houston engineers were looking at Lander’s data on the evidence, Tim Crane, the mission manager, urged his team to “continue work”, a recognition that everything was not good. “We get rid of energy as quickly as possible to keep the car in good health. We are born power. We are communicating through remote measurement radio, and we are working on the exact evaluation of what is our direction on the surface.”
The company’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first special mission to reach the moon in February 2024, but the investigation She slipped across the surface, broke its leg and longer on it. Athens has the same long and delicate design that some experts fear makes it vulnerable to fall.
ATHENA is one of the 10 missions contracted by the 2.6 billion dollar lunar load services program to encourage the private industry to fly in experiences and other equipment to the moon before the return of humans before the end of the contract. Under the Artemis program in NASA, the United States intends to put the first woman and the first person colored on the moon in mid -2017.
On Sunday, another automatic land fell with funding from CLPS on the moon’s surface at the most successful landing so far. It was built and managed by Firefly Aerospace, also in Texas, Blue ghost decline in Mary Akroium settledThe 300 mile effects are full of frozen volcanic lava.
The Athena probe is believed to have landed near the Antarctic from any previous moon mission. The Antarctic is attractive to human exploration, as its permanently shaded digging is the compact frozen water port, which will be decisive to visit astronauts.
One of the main goals of Athens is to publish the Trednette training from NASA for drilling under the surface of the moon. Any soil that you dig by the mass runner will be analyzed to detect basic ingredients such as water.
Lander carries three automatic prescriptions, the largest as it is the independent mobile phone excavation platform, or MAPP, which carries the equipment from Nokia to test a cellular network on the moon. Its purpose is to allow connections between Lander and Rover and the drone fed by the Grace missiles, which are designed to fly into a shaded hole and take measurements. But all that depends on whether Lander is working.
If Athena is working properly, it may join Blue Ghost to watch the lunar eclipse while the Earth moves between the moon and the sun on March 14. A few days later, the sun will be set on the moon and both investigations will be closed.
NASA is preparing to launch two tasks from Vandenberg space The base of strength in California. The Spherex and Punch spacecraft is scheduled to explode at the same Spacex Falcon 9 at 3.09 in the morning UK on Saturday.
Mission Bunch will publish four satellites the size of a bag bag to draw a map of the external atmosphere of the sun, or the wreath, to understand the solar wind, which is the plasma stream that flows from our mother star.
Meanwhile, SPHEREX will notice hundreds of millions of galaxies and other things to create an infrared map of the universe. Armed with the map, astronomers hope to get to know the origins of water and other components of life in the manner of the Milky Way and answer questions about the wide -ranging structure of the universe, which time trillion in a small part of a second after the big explosion.
