Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander Athena set to blast off to the moon

A private space mission will launch to the moon this week, aiming for the southern-most point ever visited on the lunar surface. The Athena spacecraft, made by US-based Intuitive Machines, is due to launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 12:17am GMT on 27 February (7:17pm EST on 26 February). Several other missions will also hitch a ride on the same rocket, including an asteroid-mining expedition.

Intuitive Machines became the first private company to successfully land on the moon last year, when its Odysseus spacecraft touched down near the moon’s south pole. Though the spacecraft’s instruments remained operational, Odysseus made an awkward landing and tipped over, limiting the amount of data its instruments could collect and cutting the mission short.

The company hopes for a cleaner landing when Athena begins its descent towards the end of March. Its planned landing site is near the moon’s tallest mountain, Mons Mouton, which is about 60 kilometres from the south pole, making Athena’s attempt the most southerly approach of the moon ever. If the craft lands successfully, it will then operate for a couple of weeks, equivalent to a single lunar day, before the lunar night begins and power is lost.

Athena will carry more than 10 instruments and missions from both NASA and other private companies. That is not all – the same Falcon 9 that will launch Athena to the moon is also carrying three unrelated spacecraft. These are an asteroid-prospecting spacecraft from space company AstroForge, which, in the first mission of its kind, will survey a space rock for potential mineable metal later this year. Also along for the ride is NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which will map water on the moon and look for future landing spots. The third spacecraft, built by Epic Aerospace, is designed to help other satellites move between orbits.

Once Athena makes its landing, a NASA instrument will drill up to a metre into the lunar soil to take samples, which it will then examine for possible water deposits and other chemicals. NASA hopes to learn whether these are present in high enough quantities to be used by future astronauts as part of the agency’s planned crewed Artemis moon landings, which are scheduled to launch in 2027.

Several small rovers will be also released near the landing site, including Japanese company Dymon’s plant-pot-sized Yaoki rover, which, at 0.5 kg, is the lightest lunar rover ever. The heavier 10kg Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), built by space company Lunar Outpost, will explore and create a 3D map of the landing site, as well as test how a 4G phone network, built by Nokia, functions in the lunar environment. Sitting on top of MAPP will be a much smaller, ant-sized robot built by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which will take temperature readings of the bigger rover as it drives.

Intuitive Machines will also deploy a suitcase-sized hopping robot, called Grace, which will perform a series of four hops, jumping up to 100 metres into the air and travelling a distance of around 200 meters until it lands in a deep crater with permanently shadowed regions. Scientists have seen evidence that these regions, which don’t get warmer than -170°C (-274°F), contain usable ice deposits, but one has never been directly visited. Grace will scan the bottom of this crater, which is around 20 metres down, for about 45 minutes, before jumping out again.