NASA has published images taken by LRO. They show the site of the unsuccessful landing of the Athena probe.
Athena was built by Intuitive Machines and launched to the Moon under a contract awarded by NASA as part of the CLPS program. Athena was to land in the south circumpolar region of the Moon and carry out a highly ambitious science program. It involved taking a soil sample to look for traces of ice in it, building the first ever 4G network on the Moon, collecting radiation data, and deploying several mobile vehicles. One of them was to move across the lunar surface by jumping.
Unfortunately, Athena failed to fulfill a significant part of its objectives. During the final stage of landing, a plume of lunar dust raised by the vehicle’s engines prevented laser rangefinders from determining the exact distance to the surface and also blocked radio signals. As a result, the spacecraft landed in an abnormal mode. Like its predecessor Odysseus, the probe tipped over, according to some reports, breaking one of the supports.
Unfortunately, the vehicle fell in such a way that its solar panels were unable to get the amount of light it needed. Therefore, the vehicle had to run on the rest of its battery charge. It managed to transmit about 400 megabytes of data from the lunar surface, including a few photos, before falling silent forever.
The LRO images were taken 23.5 hours after Athena landed, and they demonstrate the site of its final resting place. The apparatus landed in the center of a small 20-meter crater located 160 km from the Moon’s South Pole (it is marked with a white arrow). If the image is enlarged, you can see a small bright dot corresponding to Athena.
The polar regions of the Moon are characterized by specific lighting conditions that place increased demands on space technology. The sun does not rise high above the horizon, so the bottoms of many craters are never illuminated by sunlight. It is thought that the largest of these may contain deposits of water ice that could be utilized by future lunar settlers.
According to LROC
