As planned, The Athena probe is on the moon. However, the mission team on Earth is still working to Determ in the Mons Mouton region of the South Pole.
As reported in a joint press conference, NASA and the company Intuitive Machines, responsible for the Athena mission, although the probe continued to send data to the Earth and began to generate energy on the lunar surface, It has not been possible to determine immediately if it alunicized completely in vertical positionas planned. And that is a problem that this company has already faced.
Athena is the second lunar landing module that Intuitive machines Send our satellite, after a Semifracaas with his first attemptnamed Odysseus: he managed to arrive, but made him too inclined.
“We can confirm that Athena is on the surface of the moon”Said Josh Marshall, Director of Communications of Intuitive Machines, during today’s landing web transmission. “The team is in the process of turning off the systems that are not necessary. We are working to determine vehicle orientationwhich is important because that will determine how much signal we will have. ”
In the previous attempt, the problem was that Odysseus descended too fast and one of its legs broke, partially turning to the side. This hindered its ability to communicate with the earth.
The difficult adventure of reaching the moon
Houston -based company is still greater if you consider that this week Blue Ghost, another probe of the same program, but developed by a different companyhe has been able to alunize without setbacks and even send magnificent images of his views from the lunar surface.
Athena is the fourth mission of the program Commercial Lunar Payload Services NASA CLPS)which is part of Artemis – our plan to bring humans back to the moon – and the United States, Europe, Japan and other countries collaborate.
If Odysseus ran little luck, the case of the first mission of the program was even worse: The pilgrim probe, developed by Astrobotic, could not even perch on the moon And he ended up sending back to the earth so that he disintegrated and ‘died’.
In search of moon ice
Athena’s moon landing was scheduled for 18:31 Peninsular time in Spain on the Mons Mouton plateau, a strategic area 160 kilometers from the South Lunar Pole, which has aroused great interest in its potential to house water in the form of ice.
The IM-2 mission aims to seek water reserves in the area, fundamental for future manned missions and possible lunar colonization.
Thanks to the fact that Athena has come to send images in which the Moon was seen we have been able to see how the region is in.
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