Companies and organizations can spend years developing experiments and other payloads for a space mission. Those payloads are then subjected to risks beyond the control of their owners. A launch failure or a satellite anomaly means all that effort was for naught.
The same can be true for a landing on the moon, as customers on Intuitive Machines’ second lunar lander mission, IM-2, discovered. That lander fell on its side, similar to what happened a year earlier on IM-1. The payloads on IM-2 operated briefly before low power levels led Intuitive Machines to end the mission barely 12 hours after touchdown.
NASA was the biggest customer on IM-2, but the lander carried payloads for several others, including Colorado startup Lunar Outpost. It hoped to deploy the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform or MAPP, a 10-kilogram rover with its own set of payloads.
While MAPP made it to the moon, it was not able to escape the tipped-over lander.
“The rover, unfortunately, was on the bottom,” said Cody Paige, director of the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. “We didn’t get to deploy the rover, which meant our payloads that were on there didn’t get to deploy either.”
Paige spoke at an event at MIT April 24 to discuss the mission, which included three small payloads sponsored by the Media Lab. The event served as a debrief for the mission to discuss what Lunar Outpost and the MIT-sponsored payloads were able to accomplish in a truncated flight.
MAPP operated during the eight days from launch to landing, said Forrest Meyen, chief strategy officer of Lunar Outpost. “We got data on the way to the moon,” he said. That was primarily diagnostic data about the rover, which executed 250 commands along the way.
The rover, he added, survived the rough landing. “It stayed connected to the lander and transmitted data for 2.7 hours.” However, there was not enough bandwidth to collect images from a camera called RESOURCE provided by MIT on the rover.
For the team that worked on RESOURCE, the satisfaction came from taking an off-the-shelf Microsoft Azure Kinect camera and turning it into an instrument that could do 3D-mapping and even spectral analysis. “This simple camera we started toying with was actually a good instrument to detect variation in lunar regolith,” said Don Derek Haddad, who led development of software for RESOURCE.
That also included creating a new data compression scheme that would have allowed RESOURCE to return data within the limited bandwidth available on a nominal mission.
“We’re really excited to work further on this with companies like Nvidia and Dell,” he said.
Similarly, a second MIT payload called AstroAnt could not operate. It was a tiny rover weighing 20 grams that would have rolled across the top of MAPP — a rover on top of a rover — collecting temperature data. The team that developed AstroAnt, said Nathan Perry, saw this as a precursor for future missions where swarms of such microrovers might work together.
A third payload, though, was a success. “We’re less of a problem child,” said Maya Nasr, who created HUMANS, a lightweight, passive “nanowafer” mounted on the rover etched with messages from people talking about the meaning of space to them. Getting to the moon was all that mattered. “We landed on the moon, so we’re happy.”
Both Lunar Outpost and the MIT groups are making the most of their experience. The IM-2 mission allowed Lunar Outpost to flight qualify many of MAPP’s systems. The company has three more MAPP rovers in development for customers, including NASA, and is also working on a design of a much larger rover for NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle program for future Artemis crews.
“We are ready for the next mission,” Meyen said. “We completely reduced a lot of risk for future missions.”
“This mission demonstrates this virtuous loop that we have now,” said Perry. “Even at these higher risk levels, we’re still doing useful science, we’re still moving things forward.”
This article first appeared in the May 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “Making lunar lemonade from lunar lemons.”
