Athena lunar lander declared dead after landing sideways

Athena, the private lunar lander from Intuitive Machines, missed its mark while landing on the moon Thursday and ended up sideways in a frigid crater. 

It did, however, manage to send back pictures confirming its position and activate a few experiments before going silent. 

What happened to the Athena lunar lander? 

What they're saying:

Intuitive said Athena missed its landing mark by more than 800 feet. It’s unlikely Athena’s batteries can be recharged because of how the solar panels are pointed and the crater’s extremely cold temperatures. 

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"The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission," the company said in a statement.

The backstory:

Athena launched last week packed with an ice drill, drone, and a pair of rovers from NASA and other customers. 

It touched down on the moon Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble. 

Initially, the Athena lander dropped out of lunar orbit as planned. The hourlong descent appeared to go well until the final approach when the laser navigation system began acting up. It took a while for Mission Control to confirm touchdown.

This was the second landing attempt for Intuitive Machines. The first, a year ago, also ended with a sideways landing, but the company was able to keep it going for longer than this time despite hampered communications and operations.

Until last year, the U.S. had not landed on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. No one else has sent astronauts to the moon, the overriding goal of NASA’s Artemis program. And only four other countries have successfully landed robotic spacecraft on the moon: Russia, China, India and Japan.

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Earlier in the week, another Texas company scored a successful landing under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. Firefly Aerospace put its Blue Ghost lander down in the far northern latitudes of the moon’s near side.

NASA wants to jumpstart business on the moon

Big picture view:

The two moon landings this week are part of NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program meant to get experiments to the surface and jumpstart business. The commercial landers are also seen as scouts for the astronauts who will follow later this decade under NASA's Artemis program, the successor to Apollo.

NASA officials said before the landing that they knew going in that some of the low-cost missions would fail. But with more private missions to the moon, that increases the number of experiments getting there.

NASA spent tens of millions of dollars on the ice drill and two other instruments riding on Athena, and paid an additional $62 million for the lift. Most of the experiments were from private companies, including the two rovers. The rocket-powered drone came from Intuitive Machines — it's meant to hop into a permanently shadowed crater near the landing site in search of frozen water.

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To lower costs even more, Intuitive Machines shared its SpaceX rocket launch with three spacecraft that went their separate ways. Two of them — NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer and AstroForge’s asteroid-chasing Odin — are in jeopardy.

NASA said this week that Lunar Trailblazer is spinning without radio contact and won’t reach its intended orbit around the moon for science observations. Odin is also silent, with its planned asteroid flyby unlikely.