The intuitive machine landed a robot on the moon last year. The Houston company can do that again, but will this time make the spaceship stand upright?
When the spacecraft named Odysseus was placed on the moon last February, it was able to communicate with the Earth, despite it lying on its side. It was the first commercially available lander to reach the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first American vehicle to land softly on the moon.
The company's second lander, the name Athena, is currently appearing on Launchpad. Here's what you need to know about Wednesday flights:
When will it be released and how can I see it?
Athena and three other spacecraft will be launched on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch is scheduled for February 26th at 7:16pm east time.
In the event of weather or technical issues, a backup opportunity will be available in a 4-day startup window. The mission must then be delayed by a month.
NASA offers coverage for launches that begin approximately 45 minutes before lift-off.
Where is Athena going?
If the launch occurs on Wednesday, the intuitive mechanical spacecraft will attempt to land on March 6th at Mont Smouton, an area about 100 miles from the moon's Antarctic. This would be closer to Antarctica than any previous lunar lander.
What does Athena carry?
The main payload is NASA's drills as part of the Commercial Month Payload Services program. Incorporating something into the moon to pay for a commercial company like an intuitive machine is cheaper than having a NASA design and building its own spacecraft.
The drill is designed to dig into soil about 3 feet below the surface. Extract approximately 4 inches of lunar soil at a time. An instrument known as a mass spectrometer sniffs around excavated materials of compounds like frozen water that easily convert into gas.
The Athena Lander also carries three robot rovers and a small flying “hopper” that unfolds after landing.
The largest rover, known as the Mobile Autonomous Exploration Platform or Map, is part of the NASA financial test for the first mobile phone network of the month. Nokia tested the technology by gaining funding from the space agency, but then needed a way to move at least one antenna a certain distance from Lander. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outspost to build a dog-sized rover.
The Moon Post base sold the map space to other customers. For one, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a small rover called the Astroant.
Athena also deploys a rover called Yaoki, built by the Japanese company Dimon. This is a little bigger than a MAC minicomputer.
The intuitive machine built the hopper as part of another NASA contract. Ships with small rockets can offer new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to how NASA's ingenuity helicopters on Mars offer another way to explore areas that are not easily reachable to the ground.
In an airless moon, helicopters cannot fly, but thrusters allow hoppers to fly long distances. It also features one of the antennas of Nokia mobile phones. The plan is to fly to one of the shadow craters forever on the moon.
Solar eclipse? !
The superficial mission is expected to last for less than a day, or until Earth Day, about 10 days, until the sun sets. Due to the lack of solar energy, spacecraft batteries are short of power.
However, mid-day on the moon, around 2am on March 14th, the darkness settles for a few minutes. This is the solar eclipse when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon.
Solar-powered Landers must pull power from the battery during the solar eclipse, but they must survive.
Why did the last lander of the intuitive machine fall?
The Odysseus Lander was to use a laser altimeter to lead to the surface of the moon. However, due to monitoring during launch preparations, the device's safety switch was never disabled and the tool was no longer useful. The intuitive mechanical engineers have quickly rewritten the landing software to use similar measurements from the spacecraft's experimental NASA equipment. However, they missed an update of one important parameter in the computer code, and the landing software ignored the data.
Therefore, the spacecraft was not forgotten at accurate altitude, and simply guessed the distance above the surface based on measurements of horizontal speed and acceleration of the spacecraft speed calculated from the camera image. The speculation was close enough and didn't crash, but it was still moving horizontally. The landing gear was broken and the spacecraft was tilting.
Athena Lander is almost the same as Odysseus. Each of them is what the company calls NOVA-C designs, and intuitive machine officials say they have tested the lasers multiple times.
What other spaceships are traveling with Athena?
Three more separate spacecraft are on the Falcon 9 rocket. They essentially take advantage of the extra payload space of the rocket to make cheap rides into space.
One Lunar Trailblazer is a lost cost NASA mission (approximately $100 million) designed to measure the distribution of water from orbit.
Athena makes a short week trip to the moon, but the lunar pioneer takes a more relaxed, more fuel-efficient path. If the launch occurs on Wednesday, it will take just four months to reach the month. (If the release occurs on another day, the trajectory will change and the journey may take around seven months.)
The second spacecraft, Odin, is a microwave-sized spacecraft built by the Astroforge squad in California. It heads to a nearby asteroid to see if it is full of precious metals that could be mined in the future.
The third vehicle, Kime Radio 1, is a spacecraft from San Francisco's epic aerospace, designed to place small satellites in distant orbit.
What else will soon land on the moon?
Athena is the third commercial lander to be released towards the month of this year, but it may be the second to arrive.
On January 15th, the Falcon 9 rocket carried two other landers and launched it. It's the resilience of Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost in Austin, Texas, and Japanese iSpace.
Like Athena, Blue Ghost is part of NASA's CLPS program and is scheduled to land on March 2nd ahead of Athena. We are heading for Male Chrysium, a basin in the northeast quadrant near the moon.
Resilience, also known as Hakuto-R Mission 2 Lander, is taking an indirect route and is expected to arrive in the month in May. Its landing site is located in the heart of the mare in the northern hemisphere of the moon or near the cold seas. This will be Ispace's second lunar landing attempt. That first mission was crashed in 2023.
