Last Thursday, two U.S. “spacecraft launched to the Moon” from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, “on their way to hunt for water that scientists think exists at the lunar south pole.” One is orbiting the Moon, while the other landed sideways on the Moon yesterday, leading to it being declared dead.
It was expected that what the craft would find upon landing would “have big ramifications for NASA’s plans to send astronauts to this part of the Moon in the coming years,” reports Nature:
Lunar water could provide a resource for expanded lunar exploration, such as by supplying the raw ingredients for rocket fuel at Moon bases. Scientists have known since 2009 that such water exists, but they want to know much more about where it is and how much there is. The two new spacecraft ‘are going after really important pieces of that puzzle’, says Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist…The lander is the second attempt by Intuitive Machines, a company based in Houston, Texas, whose first lunar spacecraft tipped over on landing last year….Many space agencies and scientists are keen to learn more about water at the lunar poles, which hold a geological record of the Solar System’s early history. The Indian mission Chandrayaan-2 is currently orbiting the Moon and building up its own data on where water might exist, as is a Korean probe that carries a NASA instrument to peer into shadowed, potentially ice-rich craters.
But the lander had a disastrous landing on March 6, reports The Associated Press:
A private lunar lander is no longer working after landing sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole…after the botched landing attempt by Texas-based Intuitive Machines….the lander named Athena missed its mark by more than 800 feet and ended up in a frigid crater, the company said in declaring it dead.
Athena managed to send back pictures confirming its position and activate a few experiments before going silent. NASA and other customers had packed the lander with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of experiments including an ice drill, drone and pair of rovers to roam the unexplored terrain ahead of astronauts’ planned arrival later this decade.
It’s unlikely Athena’s batteries can be recharged given the way the lander’s solar panels are pointed and the extreme cold in the crater. “The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission,” the company said. The bigger, four-wheeled rover never made it off the fallen lander, but data beamed back indicates it survived and could have driven away had everything gone well….
Earlier in the week, another Texas company scored a successful landing under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to jumpstart business on the moon while preparing for astronauts’ return. Firefly Aerospace put its Blue Ghost lander down in the far northern latitudes of the moon’s near side.
In other news, NASA has downgraded the chance that the asteroid YR4 will hit the Earth. A NASA spacecraft recently made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
And a British spacecraft captured up-close images of Mercury.
Last year, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
