Commercial lunar lander Athena heading to the moon with a drill, rover and rocket-powered "hopper" to search for ice
With two commercial moon landers already on their way, Houston-based Intuitive Machines launched its second robotic lander atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, the centerpiece of a multi-element NASA-sponsored mission to help pave the way for human expeditions.
The workhorse rocket's nine first-stage engines roared to life at 7:16 p.m. EST, pushing the booster away from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center atop 1.9 million pounds of thrust and a brilliant jet of flaming exhaust.
Arcing to the east through a crystal-clear early evening sky, the rocket quickly disappeared from view as it consumed propellant and lost weight. Two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, the first stage fell away and the Falcon 9 continued toward space on the power of its single second stage engine.
A little less than six minutes after that, the upper stage engine shut down, putting the rocket on the planned trajectory. A second one-minute firing was carried out 36 minutes after launch to put the upper stage and its payloads on course for the moon.
Given the on-time launch and assuming no major problems, the Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesa-like structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6, setting down just 100 miles from the moon's south pole — closer than any other spacecraft has attempted.
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.
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.
AstroForge's commercially developed Odin asteroid prospector was released four minutes after Athena, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer satellite was deployed about 20 seconds after that followed a few seconds later by Epic Aerospace's Chimera GEO-1 space tug.
Odin is headed for 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.
During the Lunar Trailblazer's two-year mission, two instruments will study the nature of any ice that might be present in the lunar soil below while measuring surface temperatures on a global scale.
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 Earth orbit.
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.
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."
