Lunar lander Athena touches down on the moon

The Athena lunar lander reached the moon on Thursday. At 17:32 CET, the transportation device from Intuitive Machines touched down on the surface. Mons Mouton is the southernmost lunar location ever reached by a man-made device. However, it is unclear whether Athena is standing upright or has tipped over like its predecessor Odysseus.

The fact that the engine was still running after contact with the ground was cause for optimism. It should switch off automatically if it is not in an upright position. One of Athena's radios apparently failed, but another is providing data, including images. These have not yet been published. Solar power production is also working, says Intuitive Machines. The mission, called IM-2, is two years behind the original schedule set by the client NASA.

In February 2024, Intuitive Machines became the first private space company to successfully land on the moon. At that time, Odysseus touched down in the lunar southern hemisphere, but tipped over in the process. Three earlier attempts failed. Now Intuitive Machines is the first private space company with two moon landings. Just last weekend, another commercial US lander reached the moon. Firefly Aerospace's "Blue Ghost", which is around two meters high and three meters wide, successfully landed in Mare Crisium.

Bounce, drive, drill

The Athena lander is 4.70 meters high and has a diameter of just under 1.6 meters. It weighs 2.1 tons and can carry a payload of around 130 kilograms. There are several devices on board. The most prominent of these is a drill called PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1), which will drill to a depth of almost one meter and deposit the drill cores on the surface. There they will be examined for traces of water, while the mass spectrometer built into PRIME-1 will search for traces of gases.

Also on board is a 70 centimeter high hopper called Grace – a reference to the legendary Grace Hopper, who laid the foundation for the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), among other things. Grace is supposed to perform jumps with the help of cold gas jets and jump up to 25 kilometers from the landing site into a crater that is constantly in the shadows. There, Grace will use a radiometer (LRAD) provided by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to measure the temperature of the rock without contact. She will analyze the water content of the lunar dust with a neutron spectrometer, take photos and then hop back to Athens.

Two rovers, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) and the small Yaoki, will explore the area around the landing site and collect data. MAPP is even to venture as far as the lunar South Pole. Finally, the Lunar Surface Communication System, a 4G/LTE mobile communications system from Nokia, is also on board. So perhaps Nokia will win the race for the first MMS from the moon (Moon MMS, M3S), which was announced on April 1, 2005.

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