With two commercial lunar landers already on their way, Houston-based Intuitive Machines has high hopes for its second robotic lander — Athena, the centerpiece of a multi-element, NASA-sponsored mission — launching Wednesday to help pave the way for human expeditions and search for ice.
Liftoff from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center is targeted for 7:16 p.m. EST. Assuming an on-time launch and no major problems, the Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesalike structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6. The landing site is just 100 miles from the moon’s south pole.
Intuitive Machines
Another privately-built moon lander, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, was launched by a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket on Jan. 15 and is on course to land on the moon early Sunday. Touching down near the center of Mare Crisium, it is equipped with 10 NASA-sponsored instruments to collect data needed for planned astronaut landings in the agency’s Artemis program.
Blue Ghost shared its Falcon 9 with yet another moon lander, this one built by the Japanese company ispace. It is on a longer, low-energy trajectory to the moon and is expected to land in May.
What’s different about the Athena lander
The Athena lander represents a more complex mission with broader science goals. Intuitive Machines managers say they incorporated dozens of upgrades and improvements to insure a safe, upright landing after the company’s first lander, Odysseus, tipped over during touchdown last February.
“Every time you go, it’s … a roll-the-dice thing,” said CEO Steve Altemus. “I think we have higher confidence, but we’re also have a much more complicated mission this time.
“This time we’re flying with a deployable drill. We’re flying with a deployable rover, we’re flying with a drone, (a) rocket-powered drone that hops, flies off the lander and hops along the surface and down into a permanently shadowed (crater).
“All those deployments and surface operations are new, and we’re going to learn when we do those,” he said.
The Athena lander’s Trident drill and a mass spectrometer will analyze the ultra-cold soil beneath the spacecraft. The lander also will deploy a small commercially-built rover and a rocket-powered hopper that will jump up to 300 feet high before bounding into a nearby, permanently shadowed crater in search of ice deposits.
Ice would be a critical resource for future astronauts, if it can be extracted, because it can be turned into drinking water, air and even rocket fuel, providing in situ resources that otherwise would have to be carried up from Earth.
SpaceX
Data collected by orbiting satellites indicate reservoirs of ice may be present in the cold, dark interiors of polar craters that never see the light of the sun. Athena’s mission is the first to actually search for the suspected ice from the surface.
The hopper, named Grace after software pioneer Grace Hopper, and the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform rover built by a company called Lunar Outpost, will communicate with the Athena lander via cellular networking equipment provided by Nokia in a first-of-its-kind demonstration.
Other spacecrafts tagging along
A tiny microrover known as Yaoki, provided by Tokyo-based Dymon Co., will be dropped to the surface from the Athena lander. It will provide close-up images of the lunar soil, or regolith, and beam them back to Earth through Athena.
In case all that is not enough, hitching a ride aboard the Falcon 9 are three more independent spacecraft, one provided by NASA and two from private companies.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer will be released on its own trajectory shortly after launch, headed for an orbit around the moon’s poles. During its two-year mission, two instruments will study the nature of any ice that might be present in the soil below while measuring surface temperatures on a global scale.
The second hitchhiker is a commercially-built probe called Odin, built by AstroForge, that’s headed to deep space on an asteroid prospecting mission. It will be the first commercially-built probe to fly beyond the moon, heading for an asteroid flyby to look for potentially valuable mineral deposits.
The third satellite, known as Chimera GEO, was provided by Epic Aerospace. It’s a compact space tug built to move small satellites to different locations in space.
The Grace hopper may end up the star of the show. Five hops are planned with the first carrying it to an altitude of about 65 feet to a landing another 65 feet from Athena.
“On the second hop, we expect to go around 50 meters (164 feet) altitude. And on the third hop we’ll go about 100 meters (328 feet) altitude,” said Trent Martin, a senior vice president at Intuitive Machines.
Intuitive Machines
The fourth hop will carry Grace into a permanently shadowed crater some 1,500 from the lander. It’s fifth and final hop, either commanded through the Nokia network or triggered by a backup timer, will carry Gracie back up and out of the crater.
“The purpose of the demo is to show that we can reach extreme environments with technologies other than rovers,” Martin said. “The idea is that if you have a really deep crater and you want to get down into that crater, why not do it with something like a drone?”
The costs of the mission
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $62 million to deliver the Trident drill and mass spectrometer, known collectively as Prime-1, to the moon. NASA’s “tipping point” technology development program paid $15 million to help fund Nokia’s cellular communications integration and another $41 million helps finance Intuitive’s Grace hopper.
Finally, NASA spent another $89 million on the Lunar Trailblazer satellite and mission operations. Total cost to NASA: $207 million.
The mission was funded in large part by the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
The CLPS program is aimed at encouraging private industry to launch agency payloads to the moon to collect needed science and engineering data before Artemis astronauts begin work on the surface near the lunar south pole later this decade.
“NASA is investing in commercial delivery services to the moon to enable industry growth and to support long-term lunar exploration, helping the United States stay ahead in space innovation,” said Nicola Fox, head of NASA’s space science mission directorate.
Athena is Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS-sponsored lunar lander. The company’s first lander, Odysseus, touched down on the moon on Feb. 22, 2024. But the spacecraft came down harder than expected and it was moving slightly to one side at the moment of touchdown. It apparently caught a footpad on the surface and tipped over on its side.
The spacecraft still had power, however, and it sent back data for several days. This time around, multiple upgrades were put in place to insure a safe landing for Athena.
“If you can routinely land on the moon, all the smart people, the scientists, and the engineers that want to fly things to the moon will now be willing to invest money, to build and engineer the systems that will help us live and work on the moon,” Altemus said.
“These are the initial highways or trails that open up a whole new region of exploration of the moon. Like the United States when it was very young, go west, right? This is like that. Just like that.”
