BOULDER, Colo. — Boulder, we have a problem. A camera to map the moon’s South Pole, which was developed in part at the University of Colorado Bolder, never got a chance to do its job.
The camera, called Moon3D, was inside the lander Athena, which toppled over upon landing, trapping the rover inside and nullifying the mission.
The camera was supposed to generate the first up-close map of that part of the moon. It was based on technology from the old Xbox Kinect gaming system and was mounted to a rolling robot that was intended to travel throughout the moon’s South Pole.
“The lander, because it seems to have landed on a steep slope, it toppled over just after landing, and unfortunately, we were not able to get the rover out of the garage or operate our instrument,” said Dr. Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at CU Boulder who helped develop Moon3D. “It is disappointing. Space is hard."
The incredibly detailed maps would have provided information about temperatures across the moon’s surface. Tiny craters called micro-cold traps never see the sun and could harbor ice deposits and provide information about water on the moon.
Athena was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Hayne and the scientists at CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics will provide another camera for a similar mission to the moon’s South Pole in 2027.
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