A private company will attempt to complete a quick one-two punch at the moon’s face today as Intuitive Machines looks to follow up Firefly Aerospace’s recent lunar landing success, but this time on the south pole.
The Houston-based company’s Athena lander on the IM-2 mission is targeting a 12:32 p.m. ET, touchdown in a lunar plateau called Mons Mouton, one of NASA’s potential landing spots for future human missions under its Artemis program.
It would be the second robotic moon landing in just five days following Sunday’s success by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which was in the northeast quadrant of the moon.
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. Once it lands, it will 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 Intuitive Machines, it’s the company’s second attempt at a moon landing having had a partially successful soft touchdown last year also near the south pole with its first lander named Odysseus. That lander tipped to one side, though, limiting the utility of its NASA science experiments.
For Athena, it marks the commercial industry’s first expedition to the south pole with major payloads designed to test it out as a future site for bigger human exploration, especially tools looking for ice.
“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 six other NASA payloads. But the lander also has payloads from Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outpost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd., and the German Aerospace Center.
The Nokia hardware will be affixed to the lander, but designed to communicate with both a mini rover and what’s called a hopper, which will get deployed and move away from the lander.
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 named 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 targeting exploration of 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 administrator 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.”