The much-awaited and historic private mission to land on the Moon faced near-certain failure Monday after the spacecraft suffered a "critical loss" of fuel.
The matter hits a major blow to America's hopes of placing its first robot on the lunar surface in five decades, reports AFP.
Fixed to the top of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan rocket, which was making its first flight, Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander blasted off overnight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and successfully separated from its launch vehicle.
A few hours later, Astrobotic began reporting technical troubles, starting with an inability to orient Peregrine's top-mounted solar panel towards the Sun and keep its onboard battery topped up, due to a malfunction in its propulsion system.
Though engineers "improvised" a way to tilt the spacecraft in the right direction and keep its power going, the company posted on X that the same failure appeared to be the causing "critical loss of propellant."
On Monday night, Astrobotic said it had approximately 40 hours of fuel remaining before Peregrine entered an "uncontrollable tumble."
"At this time, the goal is to get Peregrine as close to lunar distance as we can before it loses the ability to maintain its Sun-pointing position and subsequently loses power," the company said, leaving observers wondering whether they may attempt a crash landing, even if controlled descent was out of the question.
Earlier, they released an image taken from a mounted camera that showed extensive damage to an outer layer of the spacecraft, saying it was evidence of the propulsion system anomaly without explaining further.
Peregrine was supposed to reach the Moon, then orbit for several weeks before landing in a mid-latitude region called Sinus Viscositatis on February 23.
A soft landing on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor has thus far only been accomplished by a handful of national space agencies: the Soviet Union was first, in 1966, followed by the United States, which is still the only country to put people on the Moon.
China has successfully landed three times since 2013, while India was the most recent to achieve the feat last year.
Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
