You know what they say, "when life gives you crater landings, drill anyway".

NASA’s latest lunar mission, Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1, just pulled off a cosmic mic drop. Despite a less-than-glamorous landing, Athena, the Nova-C lander built by Intuitive Machines, ended up flopped on her side in a lunar crater, the mission still managed to prove its hardware works on the Moon. And not just in theory: we’re talking boots-on-the-(lunar)-ground, instruments-on-the-regolith kind of success.

Let’s rewind a bit.

Launched on February 26, 2025, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, IM-2 was carrying PRIME-1 and its two star instruments: a one-meter drill affectionately named TRIDENT (no, not the gum) and a mass spectrometer called MSOLO. The goal? Dig into lunar soil, look for useful gases, and test technology that could help future Artemis astronauts live off the land, or rather, the Moon.

Things got... complicated shortly after landing on March 6. Instead of a picture-perfect touchdown on Mons Mouton near the Moon’s South Pole, Athena missed the target by about 400 meters and took a bit of a tumble. The lander came to rest on its side, wedged in a crater like a tipped-over coffee mug, which sadly blocked its solar panels and cut the mission short.

Instead of the planned 10-day operation window, NASA got about 10 hours.

But as NASA’s Julie Kleinhenz quipped, “It was 10 hours more than most people get,” and she’s not wrong. Those brief hours were enough for TRIDENT and MSOLO to spring to life and start doing what they were built to do. Like a lunar version of speed dating, the instruments drilled, scanned, sampled, and sent home 6.6 gigabytes of data before the power went out.

The drill, developed by Honeybee Robotics, rotated, extended, hammered, and even heated itself up to simulate future ice-mining scenarios. MSOLO did its part, sniffing out the gases from the drill samples. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, most of the gases were human-made: remnants of rocket fuel and traces of water from Earth. Not quite the lunar goldmine, but still vital data for scientists.

“From a technology demonstration standpoint, 100% of the instruments worked,” Kleinhenz said. And that’s not just a polite way of saying “better luck next time” - it’s a major leap toward building a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Because this wasn’t just about showing off a cool drill. The PRIME-1 mission is laying the foundation for in-situ resource utilization—NASA’s fancy term for “living off the land” in space. The Moon has water, soil, and plenty of raw material. If we can use it instead of hauling it from Earth, missions get cheaper, safer, and more independent. Think Moon bases with 3D-printed habitats, rocket fuel made on-site, and astronauts staying longer without waiting on resupply runs.

As Janine Captain, PRIME-1’s co-lead investigator, put it: “This is a huge step forward as we prepare to send astronauts back to the Moon and build a sustainable future there.”

So, while Athena may be lying sideways in a lunar ditch, the mission’s legacy is standing tall. The gear worked, the data's in, and the Moon just got a little more ready for human explorers. Even if the landing was sideways, the science was straight-up successful.