Athena spacecraft is 2nd lander to reach moon in a week, but location, condition unclear

For the second time in less than a week , an uncrewed American lunar lander has touched down on the surface of Earth's celestial neighbor as NASA races to get humans back to the moon in the years ahead.

Intuitive Machines' Athena spacecraft successfully landed on the moon's surface Thursday at around 12:30 p.m. ET though its exact location, attitude and condition were unclear hours later.

Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus said at an afternoon news conference Thursday that the lander was generating power and transmitting data, adding that his team will continue to work through any technical challenges following the touchdown, which came after an eight-day journey that began when the six-legged lunar lander launched Feb. 26 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that propelled it into orbit.

"We'll just have to do the reconstruction and figure out exactly what the attitude is in the location, and then we'll get on with the rest of the mission," Altemus said before later emphasizing the success of the descent. "This is the pinnacle of engineering. Of man and machine coming together to engineer something that's never been done before at a price point that's that seems unachievable."

He said that Intuitive Machines will decipher Athena's exact precision by going through the photos transmitted back to Earth. After that the company will continue its planned 10-day water-hunting and research mission on the lunar south pole.

Athena is company's second spacecraft to land on moon

Athena, which is on a $62.5 million mission for NASA known as IM-2, is now the second spacecraft manufactured by Intuitive Machines to make it to the lunar surface.

The aerospace company, based in Houston, previously etched its name in the history books  in February when its spacecraft, Odysseus, became the first commercially built lunar lander  to make it to the moon . The lunar mission also marked the United States' return to the moon for the first time in more than five decades since NASA's Apollo era came to an end.

The landing marks a historic moment when two lunar landers manufactured by separate companies could be operating on the moon's surface at the same time. On Sunday, Firefly Aerospace, also based in Texas, landed its own spacecraft , Blue Ghost, on the moon's Earth-facing side.

The work ahead for both landers is vital, according to NASA, which aims  under its Artemis program  to use  a slate of uncrewed lunar missions to lay the foundation for a permanent lunar settlement when humans return as early as 2027. Ahead of those crewed lunar landings? America's next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to  Mars potentially in the 2030s .

"Our goal is to look at what resources actually exist on the moon so that we can get ready to have our sustained human presence, and then prepare to send astronauts onto Mars," NASA Associate Administrator Nicola Fox said at the Thursday news conference. "We always think of the moon lighting our way to Mars."

Lunar landing: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander makes it to the moon

When did Athena enter moon's orbit?

The touchdown comes after the spacecraft, part of a class of lunar landers known as Nova-C, entered the moon's orbit Monday just days after launching on and separating from the Falcon 9 rocket to begin its independent voyage. Since entering lunar orbit, the solar-powered lander has been circling the moon once about every two hours while waiting for the sun to rise on the permanently shadowed south pole to power surface operations.

Athena then completed a maneuver at 5:33 a.m. Thursday to position itself as close to the surface as possible, about 62 miles above, to attempt a descent.

The landing site near a plateau known as  Mons Mouton is even further south than Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander reached more than a year ago, according to the company. The crater-ridden region is one of nine possible lunar landing sites identified by NASA for its crewed Artemis III lunar mission.

"It's 20,000 feet higher than any of the neighboring features around the lunar south pole, and it's believed to be untouched by any lunar impacts for billions of years," Fox said Thursday.

The mesa-like lunar mountain towers over  a landscape carved by craters , including the  Shackleton Crater  – a cold, dark region where water ice and other volatile materials that turn easily into gas are thought to be abundant.

What's next for the IM-2 mission?

As the mission name suggests, IM-2 is the second mission NASA hired Intuitive Machines to carry out following IM-1 in 2024.

The mission is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or  CLPS , which the U.S. space agency implemented to find lower-cost methods to finance privately-managed lunar deliveries without having to develop spacecraft of its own.

Expectations have been high for Intuitive Machines to pull off a second landing after Odysseus made it to the moon last February, though the lander tipped over when it touched down. But landing Athena on the moon's south pole is just the first step in its mission.

Aboard the lunar lander is a fleet of technology that NASA and other private companies paid to have delivered to and deployed on the moon. Those scientific instruments would next be put to use, doing everything from hunting for water beneath the surface to testing Nokia's high-speed, long-range communications systems.

The main experiment onboard Athena  is NASA's PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1,) which will search for  resources like water in the lunar soil  that could be extracted and used by future explorers to produce fuel or breathable oxygen.

Also on board are several small vehicles that will expand the area capable of being explored during the mission. That includes Intuitive Machine's propulsive drone known as the  Micro Nova Hopper , which can hop across the lunar surface, and the first-ever commercial rover to land on the moon, the MAPP rover (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) manufactured by a Colorado company named  Lunar Outpost .

Additionally, an instrument known as a  laser retroreflector array  (LRA) on the top deck of the lander will be able to bounce laser light back at any incoming spacecraft – a vital capability to  determine the locations of lunar landers  more accurately.

What's on board Athena? Intuitive Machines' spacecraft is packed and ready to explore the moon

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lands Sunday

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost spacecraft  took a much longer route  to make it Sunday to the moon after lifting off Jan. 15  from the  same launch site and atop the same model  of rocket.

Blue Ghost's landing site is near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille on the moon's Earth-facing side. The region is located within Mare Crisium, a 300-mile-wide basin on the moon's near side, that is believed to have been created by early  volcanic eruptions  and flooded with basaltic lava more than 3 billion years ago.

Now that it's on the surface , the lander has commenced its  $101.5 million  mission of deploying a fleet of  10 NASA science instruments to test the lunar environment. The technology will next be put to use for a complete lunar day, equivalent to about 14 Earth days.

Both the Blue Ghost and Athena landers will also be able to document a total lunar eclipse , which will be visible March 13-14 across the United States and the rest of North America.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com

Contributing: Anthony Robledo

This story was updated to add new information.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Athena spacecraft lands on moon but location, condition remain unclear