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Just over a year ago, Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first commercial company to land a spacecraft on the Moon, with its IM-1 mission. The arrival of the Odysseus lander on the lunar surface also marked the first U.S. soft landing since Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago.
It was the first of four planned missions for Intuitive Machines, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, aimed at increasing the involvement of private companies in the ongoing space race. By cooperating with other entities, NASA can get payloads to the Moon without needing to build bespoke spacecraft. And they can do it cheaper by ride sharing with payloads from business and academia.
Now IM-2 and its Athena Moon lander is on the launchpad and scheduled to blast off for the Moon aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on or after February 26. The whole endeavor isn’t quite as grand as the interstellar migration of The Ark (streaming now on SYFY), but it’s an important piece of preparation for NASA’s Artemis program, set to return humans to the Moon in the coming years.
Getting to know Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander
Intuitive Machines’ previous lunar laner, Odysseus, landed near the lunar South Pole, a region of intense interest to scientists and future lunar astronauts. Unfortunately, on approach to the Moon, there was a mishap with navigation and the craft suffered a rough landing. It came down at an odd angle, limiting its functionality. Still, mission operators were able to get the lander working and it operated on the lunar surface for about a week.
Athena will pick up where Odysseus left off, returning to the lunar South Pole with a new suite of scientific toys. The lander itself is a hexagonal cylinder standing over 14 feet tall and capable of carrying up to 285 pounds of payload to the Moon.
The spacecraft will lift off from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral sometimes during its 4-day launch window. Assuming an on-time departure, Athena could arrive at the Moon as early as March 6, touching down just 100 miles from the lunar South Pole.
The mission’s primary payload is NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), which hopes to find and analyze water ice hiding underground on the Moon. PRIME works in a two-part process beginning with the TRIDENT, short for The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain and ending with the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo) instrument.
TRIDENT is a 1-meter drill designed to dig into the lunar surface and deliver samples in neat little piles on the surface. From there, MSolo analyzes the piles to find out what’s hiding in the regolith (space dirt) at the lunar South Pole. Along the way, we’ll also learn about the conditions and limitations of digging stuff up on the Moon.
Meet Hopper, Athena’s crater-jumping lunar companion
Among Athena’s other payloads, Intuitive Machines is sending a tiny, autonomous drone to the Moon, capable of jumping into and back out of deep craters.
“Hopper is basically a miniature version of the lander. It flies off of IM-2, goes into permanently shadowed regions (PSR), and then flies out. He’s got a little 4G LTE antenna sticking out the top, he’s like R2-D2. He’s got a sensor that will look for water ice in the PSR,” Jack Fisher, VP of Production and Operations at Intuitive Machines, told SYFY WIRE.
Using hydrazine thrusters, Hopper will make a series of increasingly large preliminary jumps, each one building toward the real test. First it will leap 65 feet off the lunar surface, then 165 feet, and finally 330 feet. Its final two jumps will be into and back out of a crater 65 feet deep. With any luck, it will come back with new information about Moon ice hidden in the permanent darkness.
For some of the best fictional space faring around, check out The Ark, streaming now on SYFY.
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