There were several errors caused by the Athena Private Separation to overturn on the moon
In vain, he landed successfully, a few minutes later, the Athena private probe on the moon fell to his side. Developed by the Houston Intuitive Machines, the moon compartment arrived on March 6 to the southern pole of the moon, but three critical mistakes eventually led to its failure. Now it has been revealed exactly what caused the landing problem and how they are prepared to prevent this from happening next time.
As We have previously reported our paperthe Intuitive Machines, which wanted to do a historic water fennel on the southern pole of the moon, announced in early March that the Athena landing unit was no longer working on the surface of the moon. Athena worked for about 10 days before it stopped, After landing on the Mons Mouton landing, a plateau, which is about 160 kilometers from the southern pole. The photos sent by the landing unit before shut down were confirmed that the vehicle was lying on its side. Until now, it was not known what could have caused the landing problem, but by now it turned out why it had fallen to its side The private probe.
On March 6, 2025 to the moon Arriving Athena rolled over after the landing because three separate but interrelated mistakes have been paralyzed – writes Space.com.
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CEO of the company, Steve Altemus At Tuesday’s press conference, he named three main reasons behind the accident. First, the laser altimeter sent confusing signals in the final phase of the landing, resulting in inaccurate data from the distance relative to the surface. Secondly, the relief of the southern pole of the moon and the long shadows of the low sun have created low light conditions that made accurate navigation difficult. The third error was the lack of an optical navigation system: the probe could not recognize the craters at the landing site so that it was unable to correct its orbit properly.
All of these led to Athena falling to its side, making it unusable.
This was the second such incident in the history of Intuitive Machines
The company’s Odysseus space probe overturned in February 2024, although it remained functional on the moon’s surface for seven days. The company now promises that the new moon compartment IM-3 starts in 2026 will be much more prepared. The new design gets more redundant height meters, lighting -independent sensors for speed measurement, more detailed field database and crater recognition algorithms enhanced by machine learning.
If we move on, we will be successful. Get off softly, get off straight, get off
Said Altemus.
