Athena sits at an unknown angle on the Moon, hampering operations
Yellow cross indicates Athena’s targeted landing site
According to the CEO of Intuitive Machines, Athena is sitting an an unknown angle on the Moon, impacting the possibility of all surface science operations.
The tilt is hampering their ability to use the high gain antenna which they need use to download most of their data. They do not know the angle, or the cause of this issue. It could simply be that the ground slope is too severe. It is also possible the spacecraft, which has a relatively high center of gravity, fell over on its side because of that slope. Moreover, they do not know at the moment exactly where the spacecraft landed, though they know it landed on Mons Mouton as planned. They need to download pictures from the spacecraft, as well as from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in orbit to determine precisely the location and the situation.
It is also unclear what payloads will be impacted by this situation. It could be that most if all could be utilized, but that question cannot be answered until they learn more. I suspect both the mini-rover and the Grace hopper will be affected the most, as the tilt might make it impossible to deploy either.
For Intuitive Machines this situation is very unfortunate. It has sent two unmanned lunar landers, and both have had issues at landing, though it must be emphasized that the issue on today’s second landing might have nothing to do with the company’s engineering at all.
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Yellow cross indicates Athena’s targeted landing site
According to the CEO of Intuitive Machines, Athena is sitting an an unknown angle on the Moon, impacting the possibility of all surface science operations.
The tilt is hampering their ability to use the high gain antenna which they need use to download most of their data. They do not know the angle, or the cause of this issue. It could simply be that the ground slope is too severe. It is also possible the spacecraft, which has a relatively high center of gravity, fell over on its side because of that slope. Moreover, they do not know at the moment exactly where the spacecraft landed, though they know it landed on Mons Mouton as planned. They need to download pictures from the spacecraft, as well as from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in orbit to determine precisely the location and the situation.
It is also unclear what payloads will be impacted by this situation. It could be that most if all could be utilized, but that question cannot be answered until they learn more. I suspect both the mini-rover and the Grace hopper will be affected the most, as the tilt might make it impossible to deploy either.
For Intuitive Machines this situation is very unfortunate. It has sent two unmanned lunar landers, and both have had issues at landing, though it must be emphasized that the issue on today’s second landing might have nothing to do with the company’s engineering at all.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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I’m having trouble understanding how they can both have telemetry and not know the orientation of their spacecraft with respect to the local gravity vector. I would expect those to be the first three values in the telemetry stream. I have to believe that they’re engaging in a whole lot of wishful thinking right now, hoping against hope that the very next packet will show everything is alright. But what do I know?
Intuitive Machines (LUNR) stock price today:
At opening: $13.75
At 5:00pm EST: $8.43
Honestly surprised it didn’t fall lower.
Going public gets you access to lots of capital. But it does have its downsides.
mkent,
I’m not sure just what you know, but you know enough to ponder some interesting things.
The IMU is giving them a value, a spacecraft attitude. Even though they trust their IMU, it could be incorrect, so they are waiting to verify.
They said that they are receiving telemetry at a low rate, not on their high-gain antennas. This tells me that they are communicating on their omnidirectional antennas. These broadcast and receive in all directions, and there are a couple of them on a spacecraft so that one of them can send and receive when one of them has its view of Earth blocked by the spacecraft. High-gain antennas are often the parabolic looking ones, as they send strong signals in a specific direction and gather weak, or distant, signals from that same direction. If they cannot be pointed toward the Earth, or if the direction of the Earth is not known by the spacecraft, then the omni antennas are there to do the communicating until the high-gain antennas can be successfully pointed correctly. If they can be.
I’m not sure how wishful their thinking is, but they are definitely not committing to any conclusions prematurely. All that hemming and hawing is there so that they don’t tell any lies about reality. This is why it takes so long to get information whenever something in space goes wrong. If they say something that turns out to be wrong, or if they write off an instrument that they later get to perform even a little bit, then today’s statements will come back to bite them. This is our fault for letting people do all that biting.
On the other hand, if everything goes as planned, then the news conference is too boring to watch, as the reporters keep repeating “how does it feel” questions. Again, this is our fault for letting people ask those stupid questions.
One reporter asked a good question about whether these low cost missions are worth it when we lose so many of them. It implies two questions: Even as little as it was, did we just throw good money after bad? Should DOGE cancel these missions, too? Their answer was correct: the primary purposes of these CLIPS missions is to gain experience and learn lessons. As Dr. Nicola Fox said in her opening statement, “It isn’t about lessons learned but lessons applied.” During the conference, they explained how the lessons learned by all these companies were being shared so they all could apply them. This was my big takeaway from this conference. The sharing of lessons and the cooperation between these competing companies.
DOGE is run by a guy who understands the necessity and challenges of development programs like these. He also understands that these are done on the cheap like this so that the lessons to apply next time are not costly. The managers of the James Webb telescope did not understand that and included into its design several technologies that were still under development. That is why JWST cost twenty times its original budget and took twice as long to launch, where all the lessons learned there (and are yet to be applied) cost billions of dollars and cost us scores of other telescopes that could have done good science, too.
The difference is that which can be seen as opposed to that which cannot be seen. We see fabulous pictures from Webb, and our understanding of the universe must change greatly. Webb was a great success in bringing us new knowledge. We see failures from these small projects, and the public’s understanding of Moon landings has been greatly disturbed. We don’t see the telescopes that could have been funded from Webb’s expensive overrun costs, and we don’t see the lessons applied that made Blue Ghost successful.
Done this way, we can get a lot of science from the Moon in the next twenty years and ten billion dollars, which may disrupt our understanding of the Moon as much as Webb disrupted our understanding of the universe. But with Webb, we spent ten billion dollars and twenty years, losing the opportunity for scores of other space telescopes and the science that they would have brought us. Had Webb waited a few years for the technology it needed to be developed as inexpensively as the tech for these landers is being developed, then we could have had Webb and several other telescopes right now, redefining our understanding of the universe.
mkent,
It was a long rant, but I hope the answer to your question is in there somewhere.