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It is with heavy hearts we report that an intrepid little robot that made it all the way to the Moon has met a horrible end.
On Thursday, Intuitive Machine’s lunar lander Athena touched down in a crater near the Moon’s south pole — sideways. That caused it to tip over, and unable to collect solar energy in its awkward position, the NASA-sponsored spacecraft was declared dead less than 24 hours after arriving.
The fate was even more tragic for a robot, dubbed the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), that hitched a ride inside the lander. The little, barely one-and-a-half foot long rover, built by Colorado-based startup Lunar Outpost, survived the trip in one piece and was even ready to roam the rocky satellite’s craggy surface.
But in a cruel twist, Athena’s sideways landing blocked MAPP’s only exit, and trapped inside, it eventually met a slow death.
“Intuitive Machines landing on its side prevented MAPP’s deployment,” Lunar Outpost said in a statement on X. “Our data paints a clear picture that MAPP survived the landing attempt and would have driven on the lunar surface and achieved our mission objectives had it been given the opportunity.”
Nonetheless, the robot did bravely manage to send some data back to Earth proving that it was still deployable. MAPP also did enough to demonstrate that some of its scientific capabilities work in space, the company said.
Had MAPP been able to break free — or if Athena had stuck its landing — it would have been the first US robotic rover deployed on the surface of the Moon — not to mention the first private rover to roam extraterrestrial soil.
Its bevy of systems included a device to connect to an experimental 4G network built by Nokia that would have been broadcast from the Athena lander. MAPP was also equipped to collect a sample of lunar regolith — the Moon’s loose surface soil — that the company planned to sell to NASA for $1. This gesture would’ve marked the first commercially collected regolith sample, setting the legal and financial precedent for space resource utilization in the future, Lunar Outpost said in a press release.
Those ambitions, at least for the time-being, were resoundingly squashed when the Athena missed its intended landing spot, a flat-topped mountain called Mons Mouton roughly 100 miles from the lunar south pole. With it unceremoniously tipped on its side, what was originally intended to be a ten-day mission for the lander barely lasted one.
Still, this won’t be the last we’ll hear from either company. Intuitive Machines has two more Moon missions scheduled with NASA for 2026 and 2027, while Lunar Outpost says it’s planning additional expeditions, including a return to the south pole and a visit to a curious lunar landscape feature called Reiner Gamma.
More on lunar happenings: Amazing Video Shows Spacecraft Touching Down on Surface of Moon
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