Private lunar lander touches the moon, but its position is unknown

Cape Canavaveral, Fla. (AP) – A private -owned Lunar lander touched the moon on Thursday, but as he was dragged, the flight controllers could not confirm its position or was it directly near the South Pole.

Last time intensive machines launched a spacecraft on the moon, a year ago, it ended sideways.

The company’s newest Ethana Lander took the lunar out of the lunar class as planned, taking one snow drill, a drone and two rovers for NASA and others. The hour descent appeared to be well known, but the mission control took some time to confirm the touchdown.

Tim Crane, director and co-founder of the mission, said, “We are on the surface.” A few minutes later, he reiterated, “It seems that we are down … we are working to evaluate what our orientation is on the surface.”

Launched last week, Ethena was communicating with controllers and producing solar energy with controllers more than 230,000 miles (375,000 km). But about half an hour after the touchdown, the crane and his team were still unable to confirm whether everything was correct with a 15-foot (4.7-meter) lander. Machines with NASA and intuitive knowledge suddenly ended their live webcast, promising more updates at a news conference later in the afternoon.

“Okay team, keep working as a problem,” Crane insisted.

Last year, spontaneous machines withdrew America on the moon, despite its lander looked at his behalf. Over the last weekend, it was included by another Texas Company lander.

On Sunday, on the northeastern edge of the firefly aerospace moon, he became the first person to achieve full success with his blue ghost lunar lander. A vacuum has already collected lunar dirt for analysis and a dust gradient has shaken abusive particles that are clinging to everything.

This time the machines with intuitive knowledge were targeting for a mountain plateau from just 100 miles (160 km) from the south pole, which was much closer than before.

The back-to-back-moon landing of this week is part of NASA’s commercial lunar distribution program, which is to achieve the experiments of the Space Agency for Gray, Dusty Surface and Jumpstart Business. Commercial landers are also seen as scouts for astronauts, which will later follow this decade, who is the successor of Apollo under NASA’s Artemis program.

NASA officials said before landing that they knew that some low -cost missions would fail. But with more private missions for the moon, this increased the number of experiments there.

NASA spent millions of dollars on ice drills and two other devices riding on Athena, and paid an additional $ 62 million for the lift. Most of the experiments were from private companies, including two rovers. Rocket-managed drone came from intuitive machines-this is to hop into a permanently shaded pit near the landing site in search of frozen water.

Trent Martin, a mechanical machinery, said before the flight that Athena needed to go straight to deploy drones and rovers.

To reduce the cost even further, the machines with intuitive knowledge shared their spaceX rocket launch with three spacecraft that went into their different ways. Two of them are in the lunar trailblazer of Nasa and asteroid-pilgrimage of astrophorge.

NASA said this week that the Lunar trailblazer is moving without radio contact and science will not reach its desired class around the moon for comments. Odin is also silent, its employed asteroid flybe is unlikely.

As Ahena, spontaneous machines repaired and upgrade dozens of the company by its first lander to the company’s sideways. It still managed to operate briefly, which ended the drought of the Moon-land of America for more than 50 years.

Till then, the US had not landed on the moon in 1972 since Apollo 17. No one else has sent astronauts on the moon of NASA’s Artemis program, astronauts on the moon. And only four other countries have successfully launched the robotic spacecraft on the moon: Russia, China, India and Japan.

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