The day after it landed on the moon, the robot Athena spacecraft, built by intuitive Houston machinery, is dead.
In a website update on Friday, the company confirmed that Athena, the same fate that hit Odysseus, the first lunar lander last year, has been flipped over to that side. The spacecraft's batteries could not be recharged because the solar panels were unable to head towards the sun.
The company said it does not expect the spacecraft to revive.
“The mission controller was able to accelerate several programs and payload milestones,” he said before the spacecraft became silent.
On Friday afternoon, NASA reported that some of its payloads were able to turn on data and send it back before Lander stopped working. The mission was supposed to last for 10 days until the darkness of the moon night fell on that part of the moon.
The mission was part of the NASA program known as the Commercial Month Payload Service, or CLPS, which contracted private companies to carry demonstrations of scientific equipment and technology to the month at a lower cost. Another robotic spacecraft that is part of the CLP, Blue Ghost Lander by Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas, landed on Sunday and is conducting scientific experiments on another part of the moon.
Athena landed on Thursday on a flat mountain called Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the moon's Antarctica. It was the southernmost landing site of any spacecraft.
The spacecraft has now moved to about 800 feet from the targeted landing site, the company said.
Athena carried payloads to NASA and commercial customers, including three rovers, a rocket-powered drone and a drill to plunge into the lunar soil in search of water ice.
Shortly after landing, it was revealed that the spacecraft was not functioning as expected.
At a post-landing press conference, Steve Artemas, CEO of Intuitive Machinery, portrayed the hardships from a positive perspective. “Whenever I ship a spacecraft to Florida for flight and operate it on the moon a week later, I declare its success,” he said.
Investors don't seem to agree. Shares in publicly traded company Intuitive Machines fell 20% on Thursday and continued to decline at the start of trading on Friday. At noon on Friday, the company's shares were trading for less than $9 from the $13, when the stock market opened on Thursday.
Nicola Fox, the NASA's Science Mission Director, also tried to put a positive spin on the discouraged results. “Our goal is to set American companies and establish a monthly economy on the surface,” she said. “That means you will always learn lessons that you can provide and use in the future, even if it doesn't land completely.”
But Athena's quick death once again raises questions about the soundness of NASA's strategy.
So far, four CLP missions have been launched. Only the Sunday landing of Blue Ghost Spacecraft by Firefly appears to be totally successful. The two landers sent from the intuitive machinery both landed in working states, but fell and failed to achieve most of the scientific goals.
The fourth CLPS mission with Pittsburgh astrobotic technology completely missed the moon last year when the propulsion system of its Peregrine spacecraft was accidentally implemented shortly after launch.
“You really want at least two companies to be successful,” said Thomas Zulbuchen, who preceded Dr. Fox.
But Dr. Zurbuchen said from the start that perhaps half of the mission would fail as businesses found wise ways to take risks when building cheap spacecrafts.
The near perfect success of Blue Ghost shows that a month's mission with a cheaper price tag is feasible. NASA paid Firefly $110 million to provide $44 million worth of scientific experiments.
In the case of Athena, NASA agreed to pay an intuitive $62.5 million machine for delivery service to Mons Mouton. The intertwining of business relations between Athena payloads suggests that the goal of spurring a profitable monthly economy is not entirely fantastical.
Nokia, for example, had won a NASA contract to deploy its 4G LTE mobile phone network on the month. Nokia then hired an Lunar Post base in Golden, Colorado, to build a rover that moves mobile phone antennas that change distances from the Athena Lander as part of a technology test.
The Moon's front post base then sold the Rover space to other commercial customers.
In a statement, Nokia said the system was turned on successfully after landing and operated for about 25 minutes.
“Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make its first cell call on the month due to factors beyond our control that lead to extreme temperatures in the user device module,” the statement said.
If CLPS delivery continues to fail, commercial companies and NASA can become unstable in sending more packages.
One of the important NASA instruments Athena carries was a drill built by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. The drill was on and we were able to demonstrate that it was working, NASA said.
According to NASA, equipment for measuring water and other compounds vapors in lunar soils also worked, possibly detecting elements in exhaust wings from Athena's propulsion system.
Interest in the moon reignited decades ago after frozen water was discovered in a shadow crater near the pole. By analyzing the soil and rocks up to three feet below the surface, NASA wanted to gain new insights into how much water is actually there and how easily future astronauts could dig and use it.
But now, NASA will need to decide whether to spend millions more on another drill to gather that information.
NASA already owns the same drills installed in volatiles examining polar exploration rovers or Vipers. The golf cart-sized rover was also scheduled to land in Mons Mouton on Astrobotic's next CLPS mission. However, the space agency announced last year that it had already spent $450 million and would like to cancel Viper despite the rover being built and tested almost complete.
The space agency then called on the company to offer to send the Rover to the Moon at no additional cost.
Daniel Kay contributed to the report.
