Texas-based company that made historic soft touchdown on the moon launches high-stakes lunar excursion
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Two robotic landers, one from the United States and the other from Japan, are currently in transit toward the moon — and a third has just joined them.
The latest contender is a standout: The spacecraft, called Athena, was built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which so far is the only private sector company on Earth that has previously made a safe touchdown on the moon.
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The lunar lander hitched a ride to orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which took off at 7:16 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
Athena, on a mission dubbed IM-2, will later aim to make a daring descent toward the moon’s south pole. The region is considered crucial to the modern lunar space race. Scientists suspect it is rich with stores of water ice, a resource that can be converted to breathable air, drinking water or even rocket fuel.
As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, Intuitive Machines’ lander will be equipped with a suite of technology — including a drill, a small robotic “hopper” and a tiny rover — that will allow it to scour the treacherous, crater-riddled terrain and determine whether there is evidence of water.
“It’s very dynamic with a lot of moving parts,” Intuitive Machines cofounder and CEO Steve Altemus said of the mission in an interview earlier this month.
The Athena spacecraft, a six-legged lander roughly the size of a telephone booth, will take about a week to reach its destination. The lander will have a truncated trajectory toward the moon compared with the landers that launched last month: Austin, Texas-based Firefly’s Blue Ghost, which is slated to land this weekend, and a lander from Japan-based Ispace, which won’t touch down on the moon before this spring.
Intuitive Machines made history last year when its first lunar lander, Odysseus — or “Odie,” as it was called by the startup’s employees — made a soft touchdown on the lunar surface.
Odie succeeded where many others had failed: About half of all lunar landers do not reach their intended destination or crash-land. And before the IM-1 mission, as Odie’s journey was called, only a few nations’ civil space programs had soft-landed spacecraft on the moon.
But the trip wasn’t perfect. A mission-threatening problem arose when Intuitive Machines engineers realized they had not hardwired a rangefinder — or laser designed to measure precise altitude — correctly. That misstep forced the company to rely on an experimental NASA payload that happened to be on board for navigational support.
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And while Odie safely touched down near the Malapert A crater in the moon’s south pole region, the vehicle broke a leg and landed on its side, tipped over on the edge of a crater.
Mission teams were able to reconfigure the spacecraft’s communications method in order to retrieve valuable data from onboard science instruments. But the vehicle did not operate as long as Intuitive Machines had expected it would.
With the IM-1 mission, Odie sought to test out several navigation technologies and gather scientific data using the NASA science instruments. Odie only had to perch in place as it transmitted data back home.
With IM-2, however, the stakes are higher. The Athena lander comes equipped with several smaller robots it will deploy as well as a drill expected to bear down into the moon’s surface, scouring for water ice.
“This is a much more complex and dynamic and exciting mission,” Altemus said. “It’s one thing to land on the moon. And now we’re down to business on the second attempt.”
After reaching space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, Athena is set to begin a “a high-energy fastball pitch towards the moon,” as Altemus previously described the trajectory.
The journey will include several nail-biting moments.
“Being a steely eyed missile man, I don’t know that we freak out — but there are moments of increased anxiety,” Altemus said. “We’ll see when we go to light the engine the first time that level of anxiety. Everything (has to) come together perfectly to go right, to fire the engine, to put us on our way to the moon. I think that’s the first one where it’s really going to be a knot in our stomach.”
At one point on its trip, Athena will also experience a solar eclipse, as Earth moves in front of the sun and blots out the light.
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“We’re going to get degraded power as we fly in the dark with no sun,” Altemus said, “and when that happens, we’ll have to turn off some extra equipment (to conserve power).”
The spacecraft will separate from the rocket after reaching what’s called a trans-lunar injection orbit, which is an elliptical path that extends about 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) above Earth. Athena will then light its own engines and nudge itself into the moon’s gravitational well.
After that milestone, Athena will deploy the smaller spacefaring vehicles that are hitching a ride on board the spacecraft. One is the NASA-made Lunar Trailblazer probe, which seeks to map the distribution of water on the surface as it orbits the moon. Another is a microwave-size spacecraft developed by California-based startup AstroForge that will continue into deep space in the hopes of scouting an asteroid for precious metals.
About one week after launching from Florida, Athena will then make its final descent.
The lander’s destination is Mons Mouton — a plateau near the lunar south pole.
And it’s “the closest landing site to the moon’s south pole to date,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a February 7 briefing about IM-2’s science objectives.
Mons Mouton also offers Athena “the Goldilocks zone for sunlight,” Fox added.
Though many areas of the lunar south pole are permanently in shadow — the precise locations where water ice may remain perpetually frozen — Mons Mouton offers enough sunlight to “power a roughly 10-day mission while maintaining a clear view to Earth” to allow communication with the spacecraft, Fox said.
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Athena’s landing site will be “an extremely cold environment that we believe contains volatiles — which are chemical substances that can easily change from a liquid, to a solid, to a gas,” Fox said. “These volatiles may contain trapped water ice.”
But safely arriving at this destination will be a challenge. The areas closest to the moon’s south pole are pockmarked with impact craters, making it difficult to find a patch of flat, even terrain that’s safe for landing.
“IM-2 has to be a lot more accurate than IM-1,” said Intuitive Machines’ navigation lead, Mike Hansen, during a company podcast interview last year. “So, IM-1 we could get away with about a kilometer footprint. IM-2 is down to 50 meters (164 feet).”
Altemus said the company is targeting March 6 for touchdown.
Then, the real work begins.
Immediately, “we’ll begin the campaign to drill into the surface, and we’ll try to get 10 drill cycles (and we’ll) go 10 centimeters at a time, all the way to a meter (3.3 feet) depth,” Altemus said, describing how NASA’s water-hunting drill, called Prime-1, will operate.
The tiny robotic Micro Nova Hopper on board IM-2 — developed by Intuitive Machines — will pop off the Athena lander. Named Grace after the late pioneer of software engineering Grace Murray Hopper, the diminutive craft will conduct several hops that reach up to 50 meters (164 feet) in the air before diving into a nearby crater that lives in permanent shadow.
There, the robot will attempt to detect ice before hopping back out of the crater and transmitting data back home.
A four-wheeled, microwave-size rover developed by Lunar Outpost will also roll out from Athena, packed with its own instruments and experimental technology. The robotic explorer will even carry a smaller, matchbook-size rover, called AstroAnt.
The Lunar Outpost rover and Grace hopper will also each test out the use of cellular network on the moon as part of a NASA-sponsored experiment spearheaded by Nokia.
All told, the IM-2 Athena lander is expected to operate for about 10 days on the moon.
“It’s gonna be very dynamic, and a busy schedule,” Altemus said.
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SpaceX launches Intuitive Machines’ 2nd Moon lander, 3 rideshare spacecraft
Intuitive Machines is heading back to the Moon following its first trip a year ago.
The company based in Houston, Texas, sent another of its Nova-C class vehicles to attempt a landing no earlier than March 6 and begin a 10-Earth day-long mission. The mission began with a launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 26 at 7:16 p.m. EST (0016 UTC).
This is the fourth mission to launch as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Program. It’s an endeavor to bring science and technology to the surface of the Moon at a lower cost to the space agency.
NASA paid Intuitive Machines more than $62 million to transport two science payloads to the surface of the Moon.
“We’re very excited. We’re feeling confident,” said Justin Kugler, the Director of Business Development at Intuitive Machines, ahead of the launch. “We learned a lot of lessons on IM-1 that we have fed forward into Athena, we’re calling her ‘Addie’ for short, and the team is ready.”
The flight is similar to IM’s first mission, which saw the lander, named Odysseus or “Oddie” for short, touch down at the Malapert A crater near the South Pole region on Feb. 22, 2024. However, part of the landing gear broke and the lander ended up at a 30 degree angle, but was still able to execute much of its mission.
Oddie powered down after six days on the surface bringing the mission to an end.
“I call IM-1 our barnstorming flight because we were really learning how to fly as we went. And because of the fast transit window that we take, we don’t have the weeks to months that the lower-energy trajectories have to make adjustments,” Kugler said. “So we really were troubleshooting on the fly. So really taking forward those operational lessons learned and how we control and stage the vehicle during that transition from the Earth to the Moon and then in lunar orbit.
“And then we also have worked with our global communications network to really make sure that everything is ready to go and that we’ve got smooth handoffs and we’ve done full-scale, real-time simulations with our global ground stations, as well as our ops team, and I think everybody’s ready to go.”
This time around, Addie will be landing closer to the Moon’s South Pole at a site called Mons Mouton, a mountain roughly the size of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, also known as Mount Denali. Mons Mouton was named in 2023 in honor of NASA mathematician and so-called “human computer” Melba Roy Mouton.
The mountain was previously chosen as the landing site for Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, which was originally going to carry NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission.
Kugler said achieving a successful touchdown at that landing site is not “critically important” for science, “but from a national and geopolitical perspective as well.”
“The Chinese government has made no secret of its that their ambitions for their program are not just flags and footprints and it’s not just for the sake of science,” Kugler said. “They’re going to the Moon because they believe that there are valuable materials that they can use to build up their industry without dependence on Western markets.
“And we know that they don’t share the same values of free enterprise and fair use that we do see in the U.S. and with our allies. And there’s a very real concern that they will take a similar approach to the Moon as what they’ve done in Southeast Asia, with things like the Belt and Road Initiative and the artificial islands that they’ve build to try to block some of our allies out of their own waterways. And we can’t let that happen on the Moon.”
One side of the 4.73-meter-tall (15.3 ft) lander bears an American flag that was certified for flight on March 2, 1970, as part of the Apollo program, but never flew. Intuitive Machines said a tradition it’s establishing with its Nova-C (and eventually Nova-D) landers is bringing Apollo-era flags to lunar surface.
The lander was also signed by Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmidt.
Athena is designed to operate throughout the lunar day, which will last about 10 days following the planned touchdown on March 6. During its time on the Moon’s surface, the lander will attempt to image Earth eclipsing the Sun.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander will attempt the same feat, assuming it lands successfully as well. The phenomenon was first captured by the Surveyor 3 lander in 1967.
The Nova-C lander, Athena, has a suite of seven Public Affairs Office (PAO) optical cameras, which will serve as a method of sharing images of the mission with the public as well as capturing imagery of the various instruments and payloads onboard. Five of the cameras are placed on the lander and two on the Micro Nova Hopper, called Grace.
As part of the CLPS program, Athena’s main payloads from NASA are its Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) and the Laser Retro-Reflector Array (LRA).
PRIME-1 consists of two instruments: a meter-long drill called The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) and a mass spectrometer called the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo). Together they will examine the lunar regolith for volatiles gases and evidence of ice water beneath the Moon’s surface.
“This is a really important technology demonstration for NASA because it will provide important data to help us better understand the Moon’s surface and help inform and minimize risk to future in-situ resource utilization missions,” said Niki Werkheiser, Director of Technology Maturation in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, during a prelaunch teleconference.
“It’s important to not only NASA, but to the whole ecosystem that wants to explore and utilize resources on the Moon and we will be sharing data from that mission accordingly.”
The lander is also carrying a number of other commercial payloads, including Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover, Lonestar Data Holdings’ Freedom Payload, Dymon Co. Ltd.’s Yaoki rover and Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communications System (LSCS).
The LSCS is backed in part by a $14.1 million NASA Tipping Point award issued in October 2020. It will demonstrate cellular connectivity between the lander and MAPP as well as the Micro Nova Hopper.
“The goal there is to show that we can adapt commercial communications technology to support these deeps space exploration missions,” Kugler said. “So, rather than reinvent the wheel, we can take advantage of the advances that companies, like Nokia, have made and bring that forward into the lunar exploration environment.
“And that’s important because that also allows for increased connectivity with our overhead data relay network that we’re building for NASA.”
Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper “Grace” is named for Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer who designed one of the first compilers and coined the term as well. It stands about 38.4 in (~1 m) in height and is 17.3 in (0.4 m) in diameter.
The Micro Nova Hopper is capable of carrying up to 10 kg (22 lbs) of science payloads onboard and can hop up to 25 km (15.5 mi) away from the initial lander’s touchdown location.
“The whole idea behind Hopper is that we can dramatically extend the reach of these exploratory missions, frankly far beyond what you can get with a small rover, which is ultimately limited in how far it can go on its available power and how many data points you can reach,” Kugler said.
“Hopper is a rocket-propelled drone with multiple kilometers of flight capacity. And so, with this Hopper, we want to show that we can land in a relatively safe, flat zone for initial operations and payload deployment and then launch Hopper to go into a more challenging region, like a permanently shadowed crater, collect data and then fly back out.”
The Hopper is funded and developed in part through a NASA Tipping Point award valued at about $41.6 million.
Grace is expected to perform its first hop about 14 hours after Athena touches down on the Moon’s surface. It aims to reach an altitude of about 20 meters (65.6 ft). About 62 hours post-landing there will be a second hop, but this time aiming for an altitude of about 50 meters (164 ft).
86 hours after landing Grace will attempt its tallest hop, attempting to reach an altitude of 100 meters (328 ft). Its testing will culminate with its hop into a shadowed crater roughly 20 m (65.6 ft) in depth and then back out again.
“We believe, based on our conversations with Nokia, that we might actually still have communication down in that 20-meter depth within that crater,” said Trent Martin, Senior Vice President for Space Systems at Intuitive Machines during a prelaunch media teleconference.
“If we do not, however, the vehicle will either go off on a timer, after 45 minutes it will hop back out on its own, or it will go off a temperature setting. So, if the temperatures reach a minimum, the Hopper will hop back out on its own.”
Martin said they want to validate the durability of non-rover technology in extreme environments.
“If you’re trying to do something where you can’t get there with a rover, why not do it with a rocket-propelled Hopper?” Martin said. “And so, that’s the intend of what we’re doing with Gracie.”
The Micro Nova Hopper has a pair of science payloads onboard. One is the Lunar Radiometer (LRAD), an instrument from the Institute of Planetary Research at DLR, which will “identify locations cold enough to support stable water ice deposits” and “characterize lunar surface temperatures in permanently shadowed regions.”
The other is the Puli Lunar Water Snooper (PLWS), which is a neutron spectrometer developed by Hungary-based Puli Space Technologies and backed by NASA. It’s designed to “conduct the first-ever direct surface measurements from a permanently shadowed crater, supporting critical in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) efforts for future lunar exploration.”
In addition to the lander and all of its components, the IM-2 mission will also host three rideshare payloads that are flying their own independent missions.
One of those is NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, which was selected as part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program. Joel Kearns, the Deputy Associate Administrator Exploration within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the cost of launch through its operational life (ending in 2027) is about $89 million.
The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California with its science investigation being led by Caltech. Lunar Trailblazer will use its two main instruments, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) and its Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) to locate where different forms of water exist on the lunar surface, “how the thermal properties of the lunar surface affect their distribution, and how the different forms of water change over time.”
The second rideshare comes from asteroid mining company, AstroForge. Its Odin spacecraft is going to perform a flyby of asteroid 2022 OB5, which is believed to be an M-class asteroid.
“I asked the team at AstroForge to work with incredible speed—and that speed comes at a price. We are taking exceptional risks on this mission, more risks than most companies would be willing to accept,” wrote AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich in a blog post on Monday. “If this mission fails, the fault lies with me alone. I was involved in the intimate details of every trade-off we made—and we made a lot.
“The core principle of iteration is the guiding light at AstroForge. We learn a lot from making it to a failure; we learn nothing by stagnation.”
Finally, the IM-2 mission will carry Epic Aerospace’s Chimera GEO 1 orbital transfer vehicle. Both Odin and Chimera will be deployed using Exolaunch’s CarboNIX separation systems. Chimera will carrying “an additional payload,” according to Exolaunch, which will be deployed using its EXOpod Nova deployer.
That additional payload hasn’t been identified yet.
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