A newly launched lunar lander simply captured some beautiful pictures of its house planet.
Athena, the second moon lander from Houston-based firm Intuitive Machines, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Area Coast on Wednesday night (Feb. 26).
Shortly after deploying into the ultimate frontier, Athena snapped a couple of selfies with Earth within the background, together with one which reveals the Falcon 9’s higher stage drifting within the void beneath the lander. (Vibrant specks seen close to the rocket stage could also be among the different payloads that launched with Athena, resembling NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter and Odin, a probe constructed by the asteroid-mining firm Astroforge.)
As these images counsel, all goes properly up to now with Athena’s mission, which is named IM-2.
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“Athena established a secure perspective, photo voltaic charging and radio communications contact with the Firm’s mission operations middle in Houston after liftoff on February 26,” Intuitive Machines wrote in an update this morning (Feb. 27).
“The lander is in glorious well being and making ready for a sequence of deliberate predominant engine firings to refine her trajectory forward of lunar orbit insertion, which is deliberate for March 3. Intuitive Machines expects a lunar touchdown alternative on March 6.”
IM-2 is flying by way of NASA’s Business Lunar Payload Providers (CLPS) program, which places company science and expertise devices on personal moon landers. The purpose is to assemble a wealth of cost-efficient lunar knowledge forward of the arrival of Artemis astronauts a couple of years from now.
Athena’s chief payload is PRIME-1 (“Polar Assets Ice Mining Experiment 1”), which consists of a deep-digging drill and a mass spectrometer. Collectively, this gear will assist scientists assess the abundance and accessibility of water ice at Athena’s touchdown website close to the lunar south pole.
Athena can also be carrying Grace, a novel hopping spacecraft constructed by Intuitive Machines that can discover a crater close to the touchdown website, and MAPP, a small rover from the Colorado firm Lunar Outpost. These three robots will keep in contact thanks to a different IM-2 payload, Nokia’s Lunar Floor Communication System, which can set up the first-ever 4G/LTE community on the moon.
Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander, Odysseus, touched down efficiently on the moon in February 2024, changing into the primary personal craft ever to take action. However Athena will not be the second to drag off the feat, if all goes in keeping with plan.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander is gearing up for its personal landing try, which can happen within the early hours of March 2. Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 together with Resilience, a lunar lander constructed by Tokyo-based firm ispace, which can strive attempt to contact down in late Could or early June.
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