After the historic return of the U.S. to the surface of the moon after more than 50 years last week, a private company's lunar lander will likely have its mission cut short because of how it landed.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines managed to touch down on the moon with its Nova-C lander Odysseus, but the craft tipped over to one side, likely because it had one of its landing gear catch, company officials said. The lunar lander is not expected to be able to maintain power or communicate with mission managers beyond tomorrow.

"Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander's solar panels are no longer exposed to light. Based on Earth and moon positioning, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning," reads an update from the company's website.

That's bad news for NASA, which paid the company $118 million as part of its Commercial Lunar Lander Services program, which tasks private companies to build hardware capable of bringing payloads to the moon. NASA has six payloads on board worth about $12 million that were aiming for eight to nine days of life before the sun set on that part of the moon, although Intuitive Machines' pre-launch target was seven days.

Continuous research is being conducted globally on using the moon as an advanced base for deep space exploration, and Korea is no exception in these efforts. The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) successfully implemented an electrostatic environment that simulates the moon's surface conditions, not in space but on Earth. The researchers also assessed its performance and effectiveness.

Among the most serious threats in executing lunar missions is the moon's surface environment, which is electrostatically charged. Due to its extremely thin atmosphere, the moon is directly exposed to solar ultraviolet rays, X-rays, solar wind, Earth plasma, etc. Thus, clouds of dust on the moon exhibit strong static electricity. The moon's electrostatic environment is positively charged during the day and negatively charged during the night.

Given that the moon has nearly no atmosphere, dust can be easily blown away even by small impacts due to the minimal air resistance.

Just over five years ago, on 22 February 2019, an unmanned space probe was placed in orbit around the moon. Named Beresheet and built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, it was intended to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing. Among the probe's payload were tardigrades, renowed for their ability to survive in even the harshest climates.

The mission ran into trouble from the start, with the failure of "star tracker" cameras intended to determine the spacecraft's orientation and thus properly control its motors. Budgetary limitations had imposed a pared-down design, and while the command center was able to work around some problems, things got even trickier on 11 April, the day of the landing.

To quote NASA associate administrator Jim Reuter, sending crewed missions to Mars by 2040 is an "audacious goal." The challenges include the distance involved, which can take up to six months to traverse using conventional propulsion methods. Then there's the hazard posed by radiation, which includes increased exposure to solar particles, flares, and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). And then there's the time the crews will spend in microgravity during transits, which can take a serious toll on human health, physiology, and psychology.

But what about the challenges of living and working on Mars for several months at a time? While elevated radiation and lower gravity are a concern, so is Martian regolith. Like lunar regolith, dust on Mars will adhere to astronauts' spacesuits and inflict wear on their equipment. However, it also contains harmful particles that must be removed to prevent contaminating habitats.

A moon lander that ended up on its side managed to beam back more pictures, with only hours remaining before it dies.

A frequent idea in sci-fi and apocalyptic films is that of an asteroid striking Earth and causing global devastation. While the probabilities of this kind of mass extinction occurring on our planet are incredibly small, they are not zero.

The results of Nasa's Dart mission to the asteroid Dimorphos have now been published in Nature Astronomy. They contain fascinating details about the composition of this asteroid and whether we can defend Earth against incoming space rocks.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) was a spacecraft mission that launched in November 2021. It was sent to an asteroid called Dimorphos and commanded to collide with it, head on, in September 2022.

Dimorphos posed and poses no threat to Earth in the near future. But the mission was designed to see if deflecting an asteroid away from a collision course with Earth was possible through "kinetic" means—in other words, a direct impact of a human-made object on its surface.

Asteroid missions are never easy.

NASA astronaut and Artemis II pilot Victor Glover is assisted by U.S. Navy personnel as he exits a mockup of the Orion spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean during training Feb. 25, while his crewmates look on.