A second US company – Intuitive Machines – has landed on the moon just four days after the first ever private lunar landing, but things didn’t quite go to plan.
Private US company Firefly Aerospace successfully managed to park the ‘Blue Ghost’ Lunar Lander on the moon on March 2.
And just four days later, Intuitive Machines – another private company – has landed its ‘Athena’ lander.
However, unlike Firefly Aerospace, Athena’s landing didn’t go entirely as planned.
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Intuitive Machines Athena spacecraft made it to the moon
History was made earlier this week, after Firefly Aerospace successfully landed the Blue Ghost, becoming the first private company to land on the moon.
Firefly Aerospace has already shared some super-cool footage, that’s so impressive some folks thought it was CGI or AI generated.
Less than a week later, Intuitive Machines sent up its Athena spacecraft destined for the Mons Mouton – a plateau in the moon’s south pole region.
But in a press conference shortly after the landing, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said that while the Athena lander had successfully landed on the moon’s surface, it hadn’t landed at the ‘correct attitude’.
“I do have to tell you that we don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude on the surface of the moon yet,” Altemus said according to CNN.
“Again, I don’t have all the data yet to say exactly where what the attitude of the vehicle is. We’re collecting photos now and downlinking those, and we’re going to get a picture from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera from above, from orbit, and we’ll confirm that over the coming days as we get that data down.”
As yet, it’s unclear exactly where the lander is on the lunar surface, but Altemus said he believes it is ‘in the vicinity of the intended landing site’.
The team is now working closely with NASA
The CEO went on to confirm that the team had been able to communicate with Athena and that the lander was currently charging on the moon’s surface.
“We have done some power conservation steps as prudent measures to see how long and what objectives we can accomplish in the mission going forward,” he added.
Altemus has said he and his team will now work closely with NASA to determine which scientific objectives are the highest priority.
“Then we’ll figure out what the mission profile will look like,” he said. “It will be off-nominal, because we’re not getting everything that we had asked for in terms of power generation communications.”
Despite things not going 100 percent as planned, Altemus still hailed the landing a ‘success’ telling reporters: “Any time that you ship a spacecraft to Florida for flight and end up a week later operating on the moon, I declare that a success.”
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