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This topic is offered for NewMars members to track the numerous parts of the complex mission just launched by Intuitive Machnes towards the Moon.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/26/science/ … 0657663765
The article at the link above provides details of the components, and a number of photographs.
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This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members over time.
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Reports indicate the Athena machine is down and charging batteries, but little else is known yet, including whether it is upright. It might not be: to me it looks rather tall compared to the span of its landing legs.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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Latest reports indicate they think (think!) it might be on its side.
Looking at an image of it, the height from middle of the rectangular solid main body is slightly more than the physical span between landing legs. That violates the stability criterion that worked from Surveyor-3 on.
I have to wonder why Intuitive Machines does not know about that criterion for surviving very rough field landings. But apparently they don't.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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I saw a confirming report today (Fri 3-7-25) that Athena is on its side, and unable to charge batteries. Both Intuitive machines ended up on their sides making rough field landings on the moon. Both of the Intuitive machines were too tall for the minimum leg span dimension, thus violating the rough-field design criteria that worked since Surveyor 3. The Firefly machine met the criterion, and is upright.
Amazing how that design criterion correlates with results, isn't it?
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat old mistakes made before.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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For GW Johnson.... re #5
Athena images: https://mashable.com/article/moon-landi … ines-image
My guess is that the engineers who built these systems were perfectly well aware of the wide legs successes.
My guess is that they thought they were smart enough to dispense with the tired, worn out advice from yellowed text books.
We don't have any information to go on at this point, so it is speculation,
I think that mind set was at work when the uber-bright young people were given the task of building a heat shield for Artemis.
Why use a tired old method just because it was successful with Apollo?
***
Thanks for pointing out the changes between Starship 6 success and the two subsequent failures.
It sure does look as though the longer tanks pushed the system into instability.
I wonder if anyone at SpaceX will decide to go back to Starship 6 as you suggested.
I'll bet there is a ** lot ** of heated discussion going on.
The success of the Heavy is a balm for what would otherwise be a pretty gloom mood there.
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Athena's failure to stay upright has been the subject of intense analysis by Intuitive Machines.
Their explanation for the failure is contained in this report:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-pr … 00056.html
Space
Here's why the private Athena lunar lander toppled over on the moon
Mike Wall
Wed, May 14, 2025 at 6:00 PM EDTTwo legs of a moon lander jutting up with the earth half-lit overhead.
A selfie captured by Intuitive Machines' Athena lander shortly after it touched down near the moon's south pole on March 6, 2025. | Credit: Intuitive MachineWe now know why the private Athena lander toppled over on the moon earlier this year.
Athena, the second lunar lander built and operated by Houston company Intuitive Machines, fell onto its side shortly after touching down near the lunar south pole on March 6. Athena's solar panels couldn't harvest enough sunlight in this orientation, and the probe was declared dead the next day.
More than two months later, Intuitive Machines has completed an autopsy, pinning the anomaly on three issues that worked together to bring Athena down.
The first was interference with the readings from Athena's laser altimeter, the instrument that helped the lander gauge its distance from the lunar surface.
"In the final phase of descent, we saw signal noise and distortion that did not allow for accurate altitude readings," Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said on Tuesday (May 13) during an earnings call that also provided an update on Athena's mission, which was known as IM-2.
The second issue was the challenging lighting conditions in Athena's landing zone, which was just 100 miles (160 kilometers) or so from the south pole of the moon.
"South Pole topography and low-angle sunlight created long shadows and dim lighting conditions that challenged the precision capability of our landing system," Altemus said.
The third factor was Athena's compromised ability to recognize craters in the landing area. The lander's optical navigation system used photos collected by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers).
This LRO imagery "could not accurately account for how craters appear at lower altitudes with south pole lighting conditions as you approach the landing site," Altemus said.
spacecraft photo of the cratered lunar surface, with a white-box enlargement showing the location of a lander inside a crater
Intuitive Machines' Athena moon lander as photographed by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 10, 2025. The lander is inside a crater at the center bottom of the frame; the inset shows a 4x enlargement of that area. | Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
IM-2 was supported by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science gear on private robotic moon landers. The goal is to gather cost-efficient data that will aid NASA's Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration.
Athena carried a suite of NASA science instruments and several other payloads, including Intuitive Machines' hopping spacecraft "Grace" and the MAPP rover, from the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. Athena's fall prevented those two other spacecraft from deploying onto the lunar surface.
IM-2 followed on the heels of IM-1, a CLPS mission that put Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft on the moon in February 2024. Like Athena,
Odysseus failed to remain upright, tipping over after breaking one or more of its landing legs during touchdown. But Odysseus — the first private spacecraft ever to soft-land on the moon — managed to operate on the lunar surface for seven Earth days before going dark.Intuitive Machines is working hard to ensure that its next moon lander — the vehicle that will launch on the IM-3 mission in 2026 — can stay on its feet. The company is implementing fixes based on the knowledge gained during IM-1 and IM-2, Altemus said.
"We've added dissimilar and redundant altimeters to the sensor suite, and they're going through more rigorous and extreme flight-like testing than we've done before," he said in Tuesday's call.
"We've incorporated an additional lighting-independent sensor for surface velocity measurements," he added. "We've expanded onboard terrain crater database for enhanced navigation across the surface of the moon."
AdvertisementThe team is also feeding the detailed south pole imagery captured during IM-2 into machine-learning algorithms to improve future missions' navigation and crater-tracking abilities.
"Moving forward, we will succeed," Altemus said. "Land softly, land upright, land ready to operate."
No mention at all of using wider feet.
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Those other problems might not have toppled it over, if it had had the wider feet. This thing was very tall and narrow. That makes it susceptible to toppling if anything, anything at all, goes slightly wrong.
Intuitive Machines is not the only outfit failing to face up to that risk. SpaceX has exactly the same problem with its "Starship".
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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