Private company rockets toward the moon in the latest rush of lunar landing attempts
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon’s south pole this time with a drone that will hop into a jet-black crater that never sees the sun.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It’s taking a fast track to the moon — with a landing on March 6 — while hoping to avoid the fate of its predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown.
Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon’s surface all at once. Last month, U.S. and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward Earth’s sidekick. Texas-based Firefly Aerospace should get there first this weekend after a big head start.
The two U.S. landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars’ worth of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s an amazing time. There’s so much energy,” NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox told The Associated Press a few hours ahead of the launch.
This isn’t Intuitive Machines’ first lunar rodeo. Last year, the Texas company made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. But an instrument that gauges distance did not work and the lander came down too hard and broke a leg, tipping onto its side.
Intuitive Machines said it has fixed the issue and dozens of others. A sideways landing like last time would prevent the drone and a pair of rovers from moving out. NASA’s drill also needs an upright landing to pierce beneath the lunar surface to gather soil samples for analysis.
“Certainly, we will be better this time than we were last time. But you never know what could happen,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems.
It’s an extraordinarily elite club. Only five countries have pulled off a lunar landing over the decades: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. The moon is littered with wreckage from many past failures.
The 15-foot (4.7-meter) Athena will target a landing 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the lunar south pole. Just a quarter-mile (400 meters) away is a permanently shadowed crater — the ultimate destination for the drone named Grace.
Named after the late computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, the 3-foot (1-meter) drone will make three increasingly higher and longer test hops across the lunar surface using hydrazine fueled-thrusters for flight and cameras and lasers for navigation.
If those excursions go well, it will hop into the nearby pitch-black crater, an estimated 65 feet (20 meters) deep. Science instruments from Hungary and Germany will take measurements at the bottom while hunting for frozen water.
It will be the first up-close peek inside one of the many shadowed craters dotting both the north and south poles. Scientists suspect these craters are packed with tons of ice. If so, this ice could be transformed by future explorers into water to drink, air to breathe and even rocket fuel.
NASA is paying $62 million to Intuitive Machines to get its drill and other experiments to the moon. The company, in turn, sold space on the lander to others. It also opened up the Falcon rocket to ride-sharing.
Tagalongs included NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which will fly separately to the moon over the next several months before entering lunar orbit to map the distribution of water below. Also catching a ride was a private spacecraft that will chase after an asteroid for a flyby, a precursor to asteroid mining.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Intuitive Machines is preparing to head back to the Moon following its first trip a year ago.
The company based in Houston, Texas, will send 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 begins with a launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for no earlier than 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 is paying Intuitive Machines more than $62 million to transport two science payloads to the surface of the Moon.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the mission beginning about two hours prior to liftoff.
“We’re very excited. We’re feeling confident,” said Justin Kugler, the Director of Business Development at Intuitive Machines. “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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