The moon seems to be an increasingly busy place, with missions headed in its direction being planned all the time. This is, at least in part, due to NASA’s Artemis program, which hopes to put man back on the moon in the next few years and even to build a permanent base there.

While most space missions go well, they can’t all be a success. On February 27th, 2025 the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Station, and with it the Athena spacecraft that was designed to land near the moon’s south pole.

While the initial parts of the mission were a success, the landing on the moon had some issues. During the landing, which took place on March 6th, 2025, the craft briefly lost communication with Earth. Once it was re-established, the team found that the Athena lander was on its side and one of the two antennas was offline.

Since the lunar lander was designed to use solar panels to recharge its systems in order to move on to the next phase of the mission, this was a big problem. Unfortunately, the team could not find a way to either correct the orientation of the craft or position the solar panels in such a way as to recharge the batteries. By March 7th, 2025, the system’s power had run out and the mission ended unsuccessfully.

This mission had planned to do a number of things, not the least of which was using a specialized drill to go down about three feet below the surface. The material that was brought up would then be analyzed by a mass spectrometer to see if there was any water ice present.

This is important information for the future of lunar missions.

The team had also hoped to use a number of ‘hoppers’ to spread out across the landing area and set up the first lunar cellular network. This could have been used for improved communication as well as other experiments going forward.

While the mission did not accomplish all that they had hoped, they were able to gather some information about the landing and other things, which will be used to help plan for future activities.

This type of mission is an important reminder that space exploration is still a very difficult activity. Fortunately, this was not a manned mission, and it can be attempted again in the future.

Still, it is sad to see the Athena spacecraft lying on its side on the moon’s surface.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?