Other Payloads on the Way to the moon or Beyond...

Wednesday night's Falcon 9 rideshare mission that launched Intuitive Machines' Athena had a group of other satellites on board, all of which aren't looking as healthy as Athena is.  One of those was headed to the moon while a second was headed to an asteroid named 2022 OB5.  I'll get to that one in a minute.

The first one is a NASA satellite called Trailblazer.  Trailblazer is a 11.5-foot wide (across its solar panels), 440-pound probe designed to orbit low over the lunar surface to hunt for and map where water might be found in permanently shadowed regions on the moon.  While the mission from launch through translunar orbit injection went well, things do not appear to be going well for the spacecraft, according to a NASA update.  From that NASA post:

Lunar Trailblazer was a selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies.

The probe powered up and began transmitting data after launch, but its operators began noticing power issues and then lost communication with it some 12 hours after launch. Mission operators at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were able to reestablish contact with the spacecraft hours later, but are still "working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions," NASA wrote in the update.

Lunar Trailblazer was built by Lockheed Martin and carries two sophisticated instruments to help it hunt for lunar water. One, the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM), was designed to map the surface temperature of the moon using infrared light, which could help it map mineral distribution on the lunar surface.

Another instrument aboard the probe, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was designed to measure how much sunlight reflects off the surface of the moon to help it hunt for the chemical "fingerprints" of any water hiding on the lunar surface.

Artist's depiction of Lunar Trailblazer at work around the moon. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin Space/Lunar Trailblazer) 

Finally, the third probe mentioned in the opening paragraph is from Astroforge, a private company that hopes to one day mine asteroids for precious resources.  Astroforge's Odin probe launched on the mission Wednesday, but on a different trajectory to study asteroid 2022 OB5.  The company is already planning a follow-up mission that will land on it.  

Astroforge posted a video to X that attempts to summarize the situation - time tagged in the early morning today (4:23 AM - I assume that's in EST).  It's a six minute video, and it seems to have low audio since I had to crank the volume on this computer to its maximum.  A short summary is that they're having issues but don't understand everything, yet.  The mission isn't lost, it's just not going as they'd prefer.