The second spacecraft of intuitive machines fell on the moon – and may be tilt
The intuitive machines got a second spacecraft on the moon, just one year after the completion of this achievement for the first time ever. Unfortunately, such a first attempt, the company’s spacecraft may seem to have led to it.
The moon’s land, called Athens, fell on the surface of the moon at approximately 12:30 pm Each time on Thursday. It is the second special spacecraft landing on the moon this week, after Firefly Aerospace ghosts on March 2.
The chief technology official in the intuitive machines said at a post -land press conference that Athens is somewhere in the 50 -meter -long landing area on Mons Mouton, a flat mountain on the southern pole of the moon. But he said that the company is still working on a place, exactly, Athens fell.
CEO Steve Altimos added during the conference that the company does not believe that Athens is in the “right situation” – the space space is speaking “he may tend.”
Altemus praised the mission, which he said was smoothly smoothly than last year’s journey to the moon.
The rest of Athens is now hanging in balance. The spacecraft, which took off to the moon aboard the Spacex Falcon 9 on February 26, carries a number of technologies that were intuitive machines that he hoped to test.
One of them is a Retorerflector, which the intuitive machines hope to use to communicate with incoming or rounded spacecraft. It is an essential part of NASA’s technology in building a permanent moon base – to the extent that the space agency gave the intuitive machines a contract worth $ 4.8 billion at the end of last year to build the communication system. (Only 150 million dollars is guaranteed.)
Athens also holds an eclipse mining experience for NASA, which the agency had hoped to use to determine whether there were sufficient natural resources on the moon to make fuel or breathing oxygen.
Additional loads include a Rover called MAPP, which is supposed to test cellular equipment from Nokia, and store the solid condition that was described as the first “lunar data center”.