Intuitive Machines IM-2 lunar lander mission is on its way to the Moon, after a successful launch on a Falcon 9 rocket yesterday from Kennedy Space Center at 7:16 EST. The lander, an IM Nova-C called “Athena”, is one of two main spacecraft that were launched on this mission, with the other being NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter.
Commercial Lunar Payload Services
The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which has NASA retaining the services of private companies to take scientific and exploratory payloads to the Moon. The companies (like Intuitive Machines) are largely allowed to handle the details themselves, and to work with other private space companies (like SpaceX) for things like launch, as long as NASA gets their payloads to the Moon. In turn, these companies are also welcome to bring other payloads aboard as well, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Athena.
A previous CLPS mission by Intuitive Machines (IM) competitor Astrobotic made its bid to go to the Moon last year aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, but failed early on due to valve issues. It was able to get to the Moon, but was not able to land. A previous IM lander, Odysseus, landed on the Moon last year, but had several issues (most notably a failed laser altimeter) that caused it to land hard and tip over on touchdown. Athena has a similar design, but IM has worked to fix the previous issues.
The IM-2 lunar lander does not appear to have suffered any similar faults; after a somewhat heartstopping early delay in making contact, Athena began sending packets normally, and is currently in contact with NASA’s Deep Space Network. It’s on its way to the Mons Mouton plateau, near the lunar South Pole, with an estimated arrival of March 6th. Once it arrives, it will remain operational for about ten days, until the lunar night arrives and renders it inoperable.
This is the fourth CLPS mission.
Athena’s NASA and commercial payloads
Athena is carrying a variety of different payloads, both from NASA and from other clients.
And there is the Canadian connection. Canadensys Aerospace, a “Top Tier Supplier” to IM, posted on LinkedIn that for this missions they have “seven lunar-hard high-resolution cameras” onboard. Canadensys Aerospace was also a key supplier for the IM-1 mission last year.
The main NASA payload is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1, or PRIME-1, which is focused on testing and demonstrating lunar drilling.
PRIME-1 will use a meter-long drill to attempt to drill three feet into the lunar regolith, extracting it and depositing it onto the surface for analysis. Once the drilling and extraction is done, a mass spectrometer will be used to gather information on the composition of the regolith, which will help us better understand how the regolith differs from that found closer to the equator—and especially whether it includes a significant amount of water or oxygen. The drill will also measure soil temperature, to refine lunar thermal models.
NASA’s other payload is the Laser Retro-Reflector Array (LRA), which uses reflected laser light from an orbiting spacecraft to determine the lander’s precise location on the moon, even during the lunar night. Athena also includes seven Public Affairs Office optical cameras, used for capturing imagery of the surrounding area and of the other payloads.
Meanwhile, Athena has several commercial payloads. One is IM’s own Micro Nova Hopper, which is built to propulsively “hop” around the lunar surface.. The hopper will separate from the lander after landing, exploring nearby parts of the lunar surface that may otherwise be difficult to access for a traditional rover.
The hopper includes a separate payload, the Puli Lunar Water Snooper (PLWS), which is a neutron spectrometer that will test for the presence of water ice. It is nicknamed “Grace” after computer pioneer Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, who designed one of the first compilers.
There are also several lunar rovers: the MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) autonomous rover from Lunar Outpost, and the small YAOKI rover from Dymon Co. of Japan.
There is a communications payload from Nokia, the Lunar Surface Communication System, which will test 4G signal transmission on the Moon using the Grace hopper and MAPP. A lunar data storage platform called Freedom was also provided by Lonestar Data Holdings, which is intended to be “the first physical data center beyond Earth” according to Lonestar.
Ridesharing with Athena
Finally, there are several rideshare customers that used the Athena launch to get into lunar space and beyond:
- The Lunar Trailblazer, part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, will not be landing on the Moon, but will be orbiting it, in order to map water distribution on the lunar surface.
- Odin, from asteroid mining startup AstroForge, is intended to be the first privately funded commercial vehicle to travel into deep space, and was the first recipient of an FCC commercial license for deep space communications. Odin is going to be traveling to a near-Earth asteroid called 2022OB5 and gathering imagery of it. They believe that the asteroid might contain platinum; if it does, they’re looking to make an attempt to mine the valuable metal and bring it back to Earth.
- CHIMERA GEO-1, from Epic Aerospace, is headed to geostationary orbit. It is carrying a payload from Exolaunch which includes an EXOpod Nova deployer which Exolaunch said is “mounted onboard for a secondary deployment at a key point in the mission”. The secondary deployment is apparently a cubesat, but no more information is known. Exolaunch also provided a CarboNIX separation system for the Astroforge mission.
Canadian memecoin satellite?
Notably, there was supposed to be a Canadian CubeSat from Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) called Doge-1, which is paid for using the “memecoin” Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Doge-1 was supposed to include a miniature “billboard” that would display advertisements and imagery, as well as onboard sensors and a camera.
Doge-1 was originally supposed to be part of Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission last year, but it was postponed; and while it was also reported to be a part of this mission, no mention of it had been made in any of the related materials for IM-2.
A clue to the fate of this payload was found on X. GEC CEO Samuel Reid posted on X saying that the mission is waiting “satellite manufacturing with a new radio that has better ranging at this point”.
