A private company attempted to complete a one-two punch of moon’s face this week as Intuitive Machines looked to follow up another company’s recent lunar landing success, but it’s possible the attempt Thursday didn’t go smoothly.
The Houston-based company’s Athena lander on the IM-2 mission was targeting a 12:31 p.m, touchdown near the south pole just five days after fellow Texas company Firefly Aerospace stuck its landing.
Athena’s destination was a lunar plateau called Mons Mouton, one of NASA’s potential landing spots for future human missions under its Artemis program.
The lander approached the surface descending from a lunar orbit where it was going 4,000 mph, slowing to about 3 feet per second, Its final moments before touchdown and status after landing remained unclear.
“It looks like we’re down,” said the company’s mission director Tim Crain. “We’re working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface.”
The company was able to communicate with the lander and solar power was being generated, but no photo had been released since it reached the surface.
The company plans a 4 p.m. press conference to discuss the landing.
Intuitive Machines’ first lander Odysseus in 2024 made history as the first by a commercial company to make it to the surface intact. But it partially tipped over limiting the utility of its payloads.
“Even back in the Apollo days, the seven times we landed on the moon, it was very, very challenging,” said acting NASA Janet Petro ahead of the final descent. “Each lander is unique, so each is developed differently, and the harshness of the environment, with no atmosphere, the dust that’s going to spring up when it lands, all these conditions make it really, really hard to do it right.”
Although Athena’s final disposition had not been confirmed, it did become the second robotic moon this week following Sunday’s success by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander.
Unlike Firefly’s long trip to the moon, which launched in mid-January before making the final descent 45 days later, Intuitive Machines opted for a quick route, having launched from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 26.
The goal after landing was to have about 10 days of lunar daylight to complete its scientific experiments.
Both missions were funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which seeks to transition the agency to simply become a customer of private companies when it needs to get something on the moon.
For Athena, its major payloads were geared toward unlocking the south pole’s secrets armed with several tools looking for ice, but also gathering data as a potential future site for human exploration.
“We know because of the moon’s tilt, that the craters near the poles are permanently shadowed. They never see the sun, so they’re extremely cold, and we believe that water and other volatiles could build up inside those craters and in the polar region,” said Intuitive Machines chief scientist Ben Bussey. “That represents a resource for future robotic and human exploration.”
The main payload for NASA is the PRIME-1 drill, which stands for Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1. It looks to dig down and analyze lunar regolith from as deep as 3 feet, on the hunt especially for frozen water.
NASA paid the company $62.5 million to carry up the the PRIME-1 drill and other NASA payloads. But the lander also sent up items from Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outpost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd., and the German Aerospace Center.
The Nokia hardware was affixed to the lander, but was also stuck on two payloads designed to move away from the lander — a mini rover and a hopper.
The Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover is from Lunar Outpost. Outfitted with cameras, it features 4G/LTE antennas, looking to create what would be the first cellular network on the moon, so it can transmit images that would then be relayed back to Earth. The rover will also attempt to collect some regolith as a proof-of-concept, and technically sell that regolith to NASA, although it may be a long time before NASA could collect it, if ever.
It also features what would be considered an even tinier rover on the top of the rover, the MIT AstroAnt robotic swarm prototype, “which will wheel around MAPP’s roof to take temperature readings and monitor its operation,” according to Lunar Outpost.
The Micro Nova Hopper, which is nicknamed Grace, has its own propulsion system that lets it make a series of jumps away from the lander. Essentially a rocket-fueled drone, it’s designed to make five hops away so it can explore a nearby permanently shadowed region of the moon’s surface.
“We are testing the technology, proving that we can take a drone, if you will, on the surface of the moon, and fly into places that rovers can’t go,” said Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines’ senior vice president for space systems. “We believe that is the future of this technology. We absolutely believe there’s a place for rovers on the moon … but also there’s a place for hoppers and technologies that allow you to go down into extreme environments where you can’t drive your rover.”
Nicki Fox, NASA’s associate for its Science Mission Directorate is excited not only for the main NASA drill payload, but the technology demonstrations of the hopper and Nokia communication systems.
“Those three technologies will open the door and demonstrate science we haven’t done before,” she said. “They will demonstrate how we’re going to live and work on the lunar surface and prepare us to have humans on Mars.”
