By Passant Rabie Published May 15, 2025 | Comments (0) | The Athena lander ended up lying on its side on the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines Earlier this year, an ill-fated lander skidded across the lunar surface and ended up lying sideways in a cold, dark crater. Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander was declared dead on arrival at the Moon. Now, the company has released a report detailing the chain of mishaps that led to its demise. Athena touched down on the Moon on Thursday, March 6, following a week-long journey through space. After a less-than-ideal touchdown, the lunar lander ended up on its side in a shallow crater in the Moon’s Mons Mouton region, 820 feet (250 meters) from its targeted landing site. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Intuitive Machines listed three factors that affected Athena’s ability to land on the Moon, SpaceNews reported. The first issue had to do with the lander’s laser altimeters, instruments designed to help it estimate its distance from the Moon during descent. “In the final phase of descent, we saw signal noise and distortion that did not allow for accurate altitude readings,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during the call. The Houston-based company also blamed conditions at the Moon’s south polar region. According to Altemus, the sunlight’s low angles and the topography “created long shadows and dim lighting conditions that challenged the precision capability of our landing system.” The third factor that resulted in Athena’s lunar tumble was the lander’s inability to recognize craters on the Moon from lower altitudes. Intuitive Machines relied on photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter to guide the lander’s optical navigation system during its descent. Those images, however, are captured at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) and therefore “could not accurately account for how craters appear at lower altitudes with south pole lighting conditions as you approach the landing site,” Altemus said. The company is treating Athena’s failed mission as a set of lessons learned as it prepares to launch its third lander sometime next year. “We’ve added dissimilar and redundant altimeters to the sensor suite, and they’re going through more rigorous and extreme flight-like testing than we’ve done before,” Altemus said in Tuesday’s call, according to Space.com. “We’ve incorporated an additional lighting-independent sensor for surface velocity measurements. We’ve expanded onboard terrain crater database for enhanced navigation across the surface of the moon.” Intuitive Machines launched its first lunar lander, Odysseus, in February 2024. It reached the lunar surface, but the landing wasn’t exactly smooth. One of the lander’s legs may have gotten caught during its descent, causing it to tip onto its side and end up lying sideways on a rock. The mission did operate for seven days on the lunar surface, making Intuitive Machines the first company to land a private lander on the Moon. “Moving forward, we will succeed,” Altemus said. “Land softly, land upright, land ready to operate.” Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Passant Rabie Published May 10, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 9, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 8, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 1, 2025

By Passant Rabie Published May 13, 2025 | Comments (1) | An illustration of a decaying neutron star. Daniëlle Futselaar/artsource.nl Around 13.8 billion years ago, a tiny but dense fireball gave birth to the vast cosmos that holds trillions of galaxies, including the Milky Way. But our universe is dying, and it’s happening at a much faster rate than scientists previously estimated, according to new research. The last stellar remnants of the universe will cease to exist in 10 to the power of 78 years (that’s a one with 78 zeros), according to a new estimate from a group of scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands. That’s still a long way off from when the universe powers down for good—but it’s a far earlier fade-to-black moment than the previous 10 to the power of 1,100 years estimate. The new paper, published Monday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is a follow-up to a previous study by the same group of researchers. In their 2023 study, black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom suggested that other objects, like neutron stars, could evaporate in much the same way as black holes. The original theory, developed by Stephen Hawking in 1974, proposed that radiation escaping near a black hole’s event horizon would gradually erode its mass over time. The phenomenon, known as Hawking radiation, remains one of the most surprising ideas about black holes to this day. Building on the theory of Hawking radiation, the researchers behind the new paper suggest that the process of erosion depends on the density of the object. They found that neutron stars and stellar black holes take roughly the same amount of time to decay, an estimated 10 to the power of 67 years. Although black holes have a stronger gravitational field that should cause them to evaporate faster, they also have no surface so they end up reabsorbing some of their own radiation, “which inhibits the process,” Wondrak said in a statement. The researchers then calculated how long various celestial bodies would take to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation, leading them to the abbreviated cosmic expiration date. “So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” Falcke said. The study also estimates that it would take the Moon around 10 to the power of 90 years to evaporate based on Hawking radiation. “By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation,” van Suijlekom said. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published May 11, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 20, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published February 10, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published February 2, 2025 By Margherita Bassi Published February 1, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published January 28, 2025