NEAR MOON’S SOUTH POLE

Private lunar lander declared dead after landing sideways

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.>> A private lunar lander is no longer working after landing sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole, and its mission is over, officials said Friday.

The news came less than 24 hours after the botched landing attempt by Texas-based Intuitive Machines.

Launched last week, 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 of experiments, including an ice drill, drone and pair of rovers to roam the unexplored terrain before astronauts’ planned arrival 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-wheel rover never made it off the fallen lander, but data beamed back indicates it survived and could have driven away had everything gone well, said Lunar Outpost, the Colorado company that owns it.

This was the second landing attempt for Intuitive Machines. The first, a year ago, also ended with a sideways landing, but the company was able to keep it going for longer Despite all the problems, the company’s first lander managed to put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The south polar region of the moon is particularly difficult to reach and operate on, given the harsh sun angles, limited communications with Earth and uncharted, rugged terrain. Athena’s landing was the closest a spacecraft has come to the south pole, just 100 miles away.

That’s where NASA is targeting for its first landing by astronauts since the Apollo program, no earlier than 2027. — The Associated Press