A day later Landing on the moonThe Athens Space Space vehicle, which was built from Houston intuitive machines, died.
in Update on its website on FridayThe company confirmed that Athens had traveled alongside it – the same fate that reached its first lunar exhibition, Odysseus, last year. With its solar panels unable to face the sun, the spacecraft batteries were unable to recharge them.
The company said it does not expect to revive the spacecraft.
Before the spacecraft was silent, she said, “The task control units were able to accelerate many software and programs.”
Friday afternoon, NASA stated that some of its loads managed to run the data and send it again before Lander stopped working. The task was supposed to last 10 days until the darkness of the moon night fell on this part of the moon.
The task was part of the NASA program known as the moon’s commercial load services, or CLPS, to contract with private companies to transfer science tools and technological demonstrations to the moon at a lower cost. Another automatic spacecraft that forms part of ClPs, Blue Ghost Lander by Firefly Aerospace From Cedar Park, Texas, it fell on Sunday and conducting scientific experiments on another part of the moon.
Athens fell on Thursday on a flat mountain named Mons MoutonAbout 100 miles from the southern pole of the moon. The location of landing was in the far south of any spacecraft.
The company said that the spacecraft ended about 800 feet from the target landing site.
Athens was carrying a load of NASA and commercial agents, including Three Roverand Done -powered drone missile and Training It is intended to hold in lunar soil in search of water ice.
Soon after landing, it became clear that the spacecraft was not working as expected.
At a post -land press conference, Steve Olmeos, CEO of intuitive machines, photographed adversity in a positive light. He said: “At any time to charge a spacecraft to Florida for the trip and end up after a week of work on the moon, I announced that success.”
Investors do not seem to agree. The shares of an intuitive company, a 20 percent circulating company for the public, fell on Thursday and continued to decrease at the beginning of trading on Friday. At noon on Friday, the company’s shares were trading less than $ 9, a decrease from more than $ 13 when the stock market opened on Thursday.
Nicolas Fox, the assistant director of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, tried to revolve around the positive results. “Our goal is to prepare American companies to create a moon’s economy on the surface.” “This means that even if it does not land perfectly, we always learn the lessons that we can provide and use in the future.”
But the rapid death of Athens raises questions about the safety of NASA’s strategy.
So far, four CLPS missions have been released. Sunday landing from the Blue Ghost by Firefly spacecraft has been completely successful. Both Landers, which he sent intuitive machines in the event of work, fell Overthrow He failed to achieve most of their scientific goals.
The fourth mission of the CLPS, by the Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburg, the full moon last year when its PEREGRINE spacecraft system is It was broken after its launch after a short period.
“You really hope that there will be at least at least two successful companies,” said Thomas Zorbutchen, who previously Dr. Fox as head of the Directorate of Science Mission and who created ClPs in 2017.
But Dr. Zorbutchen said from the start that half of the tasks may fail because companies have discovered how to bear smart risks in building a cheaper spacecraft.
Blue Ghost shows almost irrelevant success that lunar missions are with cheaper price signs. NASA has paid $ 101 million to Al -Yarraa to provide scientific experiments worth $ 44 million.
For Athens, NASA agreed to pay 62.5 million dollars intuitive machines to connect to Mons Mouton. The intertwining of trade relations between Athens’ loads indicates that the goal of stimulating a profitable lunar economy is not completely fictional.
For example, Nokia won NASA’s contract to deploy 4G LTE mobile network on the moon. After that, Nokia rented a company, where Lunar Outpost of Golden has made. By building a Rover that would move a variable air airfall from ATHena Lander as part of technology tests, which will provide an upgrade from UHF lunar communications radio.
Then the lunar settlement focus sold the space to Rover for other commercial customers.
In a statement, Nokia said its system was successfully operated after landing, and it works for about 25 minutes.
“Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the moon due to factors outside our control that led to severe cold temperatures on the units of our user device,” the statement said.
If the delivery of ClPs persists, commercial companies and NASA may turn to send more beams.
One of the main NASA tools carried by Athens was a phrase Blue origin. NASA said the exercises were operated and managed to prove that it would have succeeded.
NASA said that a water -measuring and other chemical vehicles in lunar soil also worked, and may discover elements in the exhaust column from the payment system in Athens.
The attention of the moon has been revived Two decades ago after discovering frozen water in shaded pits near the poles. By analyzing soil and rocks up to three feet below the surface, NASA was hoping to obtain a new vision about the amount of water already exist and how easy it is to dig and use it by future astronauts.
But NASA will now have to decide whether to spend millions of dollars for more exercises to collect this information.
NASA already has identical exercises installed on flying materials looking at Rover Polar Explography or Viper. The Mons on Mons was scheduled to land on the Mons on Astrobotic’s Next CLPS mission. But the space agency announced last year that it wanted to do so Cancel viperAlthough it has already spent $ 450 million, it was almost completely completed and tested.
The space agency has since contacted companies to obtain proposals to send Rover to the moon without any additional cost to NASA.
Daniel Kai The reports contributed.
