Just one day after Intuitive Machines' Athena lunar lander landed and capsized at the moon's south pole, it was declared irreversible. Fortunately, the company says it was able to "accelerate several project and payload milestones" and deploy some experiments before the Athena lander ran out of power.
The Athena mission marked the second consecutive time Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the moon, but the results were unexpected. Last February, the company's Odysseus lander rolled over after landing.
Months before the Athena mission ran into trouble, NASA selected Intuitive Machines to help develop a lunar communications system in a contract that could be worth as much as $4.8 billion (but only $150 million of that is secured).
The orientation of the capsized Athena's solar panels, combined with the direction of the sun and the extreme cold temperatures of the landing crater, prevented the spacecraft from recharging its batteries. "The mission has concluded and the team is continuing to evaluate the data collected throughout the mission," the company wrote in an update on Friday.
Intuitive Machines says it has successfully deployed NASA's polar resource ice mining experiment. The experiment involved a drill that penetrated three feet into the lunar surface. The company didn't say what other experiments it could deploy, but it's carrying a rover powered by Nokia cellular technology and a solid-state "lunar data center," among other things.