Lunar Lander

NASA has selected three companies to develop extreme off-road vehicles that astronauts will drive on the Moon during Artemis missions starting in 2030, awarding US$4.6 billion in contracts to Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab.

As the Odysseus Moon lander faces its final hours, there's one final twist in the saga: The spacecraft broke one of its legs on landing, thanks to a cascade of mistakes that began back on Earth, when a safety switch wasn't flicked on prior to launch.

Beating incredible odds, Japan's SLIM lunar lander came back to life after surviving the intense dark and cold of the Moon's night. On February 25, JAXA confirmed that it had temporarily reestablished communications with the robotic spacecraft.

The IM-1 Moon landing mission will come to a premature end on Tuesday morning. Intuitive Machines has announced that Odysseus will no longer be able to charge its batteries by February 27, as sunlight stops falling on its solar panels. RIP Odie.

Intuitive Machines says that its Odysseus Moon lander tripped and fell over on touchdown and is now lying on its side. One of the legs of the robotic spacecraft dug into the lunar surface during landing maneuvers, making it fall over on a rock.

The United States has returned to the Moon after over 50 years. At 6:24 pm EST, the robotic Odysseus touched down autonomously on the lunar surface, followed by a tense 13-minute gap as radio communications were established with mission control.

The Odysseus lunar lander, or 'Odie', is slated to touch down near the Moon's south pole on Thursday, aiming to be the first US-made spacecraft on the lunar surface in five decades. Here's how you can watch every tense second of the historic event.

The US is taking another stab at landing a privately owned and operated spacecraft on the Moon. At 1:05 am EST today, the Odysseus lander lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 29A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

When the Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander lifts off on February 14, it will be carrying a novel new fuel gauge developed by NASA that can measure cryogenic propellants in the thruster tanks by means of radio waves.

Japan's SLIM Moon lander has gone back into sleep mode as the Sun sets on its landing site. The robotic spacecraft began to lose power as the lunar day came to its end and it now faces the freezing cold 14-day lunar night, which it may not survive.

Japan's SLIM lunar lander is back online and transmitting data. JAXA has confirmed that the Sun has moved into a position where light is landing on the robotic spacecraft's solar panel, allowing it to finally charge its battery.

Thanks to a pair of tiny lunar rovers, the mystery of Japan's crippled SLIM Moon lander has been solved. Images returned by the two robots show that the spacecraft bounced and is sitting on its nose, preventing its solar panels from charging.