WASHINGTON — The second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines reached the surface of the moon March 6, but its status after landing was not clear.

The Athena lander was scheduled to land around 12:32 p.m. Eastern on the IM-2 mission after performing a long braking burn, then changing orientation to perform a vertical landing. Telemetry displayed by the company on its webcast appeared to show the lander conducting that braking burn as expected, but closer to the landing time the telemetry appeared frozen or garbled, including at one point where it indicated the lander was several kilometers below the surface.

For about 20 minutes after the planned landing time, mission controllers reported getting telemetry that indicated the lander was on the surface and generating power. However, the orientation of the lander was uncertain.

“Alright team, keep working the problem,” Tim Crain, senior vice president of Intuitive Machines and flight director for the landing, said in mission control about 15 minutes after the scheduled landing time. He said controllers were shutting down unnecessary systems now that the lander appeared to be on the surface.

“We are generating power. We are communicating through our telemetry radio and we are working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface,” he said. That included analyzing images taken by the lander after landing, although those were not immediately released.

The company ended the landing webcast a little more than 20 minutes after the expected landing time, with a news conference scheduled for 4 p.m. Eastern.

The intended landing site was Mons Mouton, a plateau about the size of Delaware in the south polar region of the moon. The region is of strategic interest to NASA given the potential for regions around the south pole to have water ice deposits that are both a priority for scientists and could support future human expeditions. “We hope that that’s going to provide opportunities for extraordinary science in extraordinary places,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, at a pre-launch briefing.

IM-2 launched Feb. 26 on a Falcon 9, which placed the Athena lander on a translunar trajectory. The spacecraft performed a 492-second burn of its main engine early March 3, entering orbit around the moon. A maneuver at 5:33 a.m. Eastern March 6 put the lander into its descent orbit, from which it attempted the landing.

The lander’s main NASA payload is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1). It features a drill designed to penetrate up to a meter into the surface and a spectrometer to measure any volatiles, like water ice, the drill passes through below the surface.

PRIME-1 is flying as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under a task order currently valued at $62.5 million. That task order also includes a laser retroreflector, a small passive payload NASA includes on many lunar landers.

Intuitive Machines is flying several commercial payloads on IM-2, including its own Micro Nova Hopper, a vehicle designed to hop across the lunar surface using its own propulsion system. The hopper, named Grace, carries a camera system and instruments the German aerospace agency DLR and Hungarian company Puli Space. Intuitive Machines plans to perform at least five hops of Grace during the mission, including into a crater near the landing site.

Another commercial payload is a communications system from Nokia, which will test the ability to use 4G/LTE networks on the moon. It will attempt communications both with the Grace hopper and another commercial payload, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform rover from Lunar Outpost. Both the Nokia payload and Grace are supported by awards from NASA’s Tipping Point space technology development program.

Also on board is Yaoki, a very small rover from Japanese company Dymon Co. Ltd.; Freedom, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings; and thermal protection technologies from Columbia Sportwear.

IM-2 is the second mission by Intuitive Machines, both flown as part of the NASA CLPS program. The IM-1 mission landed on the moon in February 2024 but hit the surface faster than expected, snapping a landing leg and causing the Odysseus lander to fall on its side. The company was still able to operate the lander for about a week, collecting some data from its payloads.

The company blamed the hard landing on a laser altimeter that could not operate because a safety system was not removed from it before launch as intended. Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, said before launch that the company addressed 85 things that did not go according to plan on IM-1, like that laser altimeter, on IM-2.

This mission is the fourth for the CLPS program overall. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander launched in January 2024 but suffered a problem with its propulsion system hours after launch, preventing the spacecraft from attempting a landing.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander successfully landed on the moon March 2, a month and a half after its launch. That lander, carrying a set of 10 NASA payloads, will operate at its landing site in Mare Crisium in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon through lunar sunset March 16.