CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The non-public Athena lunar lander is on its method to the moon.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off shortly after sundown this night (Feb. 26), carrying Athena and NASA’s ride-along Lunar Trailblazer orbiter aloft towards a darkening sky right here at NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart (KSC).
Athena — which was constructed by the Houston-based spaceflight firm Intuitive Machines — carries 10 NASA science devices, lots of that are designed to hunt for indicators of water ice. Lunar Trailblazer will do related work from its larger perch. That is a giant precedence for NASA, which goals to ascertain a number of human settlements on the moon by way of its Artemis program.
“I am very excited to see the science that our tech demonstrations ship as we put together for humanity’s return to the moon and the journey to Mars,” Nicky Fox, affiliate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, stated throughout a prelaunch briefing in the present day.
The Falcon 9 launched at 7:16 p.m. EST (0017 GMT on Feb. 27) this night from KSC’s Launch Complicated-39A. About 8.5 minutes later, the rocket’s first-stage booster got here again to Earth for a touchdown on SpaceX’s A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship as deliberate. This was the ninth launch and touchdown of the Falcon 9 booster (B1083) supporting the IM-2 mission.
The Falcon 9’s higher stage rocketed onward. It deployed Athena into translunar injection orbit about 43.5 minutes after liftoff and Lunar Trailblazer 4 minutes later, as deliberate.
Athena’s mission is known as IM-2, as a result of it is the second launch to the moon in as a few years for Intuitive Machines. IM-2 is a part of NASA’s Industrial Lunar Payload Companies (CLPS) program, which seeks out industrial partnerships to ship science and expertise gear to the moon.
Athena’s formidable mission focuses on the abundance of water ice and different assets close to the moon’s south pole, and the prospect for future missions to make the most of these assets for sustainable habitability in area — a course of often called in-situ useful resource utilization (ISRU). To fulfil all IM-2’s targets, the lander is carrying two secondary automobiles: a mini rover named MAPP (Cellular Autonomous Prospecting Platform) that was constructed by the Colorado firm Lunar Outpost and Grace, an Intuitive Machines “hopper” robotic that can discover the area across the touchdown website by way of a collection of leaps.
IM-2 follows Intuitive Machines’ historic first mission, IM-1, by simply over a yr. The IM-1 lander, “Odysseus,” launched in February 2024, additionally on a CLPS flight. Odysseus managed to make it to the floor, pulling off the first-ever mushy lunar touchdown by a personal spacecraft. However the probe got here in too quick and broke one in all its touchdown legs, which prompted it to tip over throughout the landing. Consequently, the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna was blocked, stopping the transmission of a few of the information that NASA had hoped to gather.
“This time, hopefully, we land in a extra exact place,” Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines’ senior vp of area methods, advised Space.com earlier than launch.
Athena is headed for the moon’s Mons Mouton area, the place scientists imagine there to be a enough quantity of water ice deposits for ISRU analysis. If all goes to plan, the lander will attain lunar orbit 4 to 5 days from now, contact down 1.5 to a few days after that, and function on the lunar floor for about 10 Earth days.
The lander’s most important scientific bundle is known as PRIME-1 (brief for Polar Sources Ice Mining Experiment 1). It consists of two separate devices: the Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) and the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo).
This duo will work collectively to gather after which analyze a pattern recovered from beneath the lunar floor. TRIDENT will extract materials from as much as 3 toes (1 meter) deep, and MSolo will take a look at that pattern for compounds like water and carbon dioxide.
The IM-2 hopper — named “Grace,” after the pioneering pc scientist and mathematician Grace Hopper — is designed to discover Athena’s touchdown space inside a radius of practically 1 mile (1.6 kilometers).
Grace will certain from one location to a different utilizing its thrusters, inertial measurement unit, star tracker, lidar and a situational consciousness digicam. Considered one of Grace’s most important targets would be the completely shadowed ground of a close-by crater — the kind of surroundings a wheeled rover can not discover.
The crater ground shall be outdoors the road of sight Grace would ordinarily want to speak with the close by Athena. The MAPP rover will shut this communications hole, for it is geared up with what would be the moon’s first mobile community.
MAPP will deploy onto the lunar floor to check the high-speed, long-range capabilities of the Lunar Floor Communications System (LSCS). LSCS was developed by Nokia Bell Labs and designed with already-available elements utilized in present 4G/LTE networks.
Athena can be outfitted with a Laser Retro-Reflector Array (LRA) — eight mirrors affixed to the lander, designed to check the reflection of laser mild to allow extra correct positioning willpower for orbiting and approaching spacecraft. The idea is just like reflectors on a runway that assist information touchdown airplanes, and the LRA can function with out the necessity for energy or mechanical management.
Lunar Trailblazer, in the meantime, will make its method to lunar orbit, the place it’ll start mapping water ice deposits on the floor. The NASA probe’s information shall be complementary to the close-up data gathered by Athena’s devices, particularly PRIME-1, scientists stated.
“That may allow us to contextualize and prolong the findings of the PRIME-1 mission to what we’d have the ability to see in different elements of the moon,” Lunar Trailblazer Principal Investigator Bethany Ehlmann advised Area.com earlier than liftoff.
NASA initially bought the IM-2 mission for $47 million. That quantity elevated to $62.5 million over the course of a number of years as a consequence of a wide range of adjustments requested by the area company, in response to Joel Kearns, deputy affiliate administrator for exploration at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, equivalent to temperature information from one in all Athena’s onboard devices.
“Underneath that contract worth, now we have the chance to purchase that temperature information from Intuitive Machines, which is form of an instance of us not paying for a chunk of kit, however truly paying for distinctive data that is going to be made out there due to this explicit industrial mission,” Kearns defined.
As soon as Athena arrives in lunar orbit, it will not be alone. IM-2 and Lunar Trailblazer are the third and fourth missions to the moon up to now in 2025. Firefly Aerospace’s Ghost Riders within the Sky mission and Japan-based ispace’s Resilience lander each launched towards the moon in January, with Firefly’s Blue Ghost scheduled to land only a few days earlier than Athena.
That mission can be flying beneath NASA’s CLPS umbrella, and can ship a complete completely different suite of NASA science and expertise payloads to the lunar floor. Resilience is not flying any NASA payloads, however the area company has contracted ispace to gather some lunar regolith (moon mud) for NASA, which can technically take possession of the pattern despite the fact that there are presently no plans to return it to Earth.
Athena and Lunar Trailblazer weren’t the one spacecraft that rode the Falcon 9 to area in the present day. The rocket additionally lofted Odin, a spacecraft constructed by the asteroid-mining firm Astroforge, and CHIMERA GEO 1, an orbital switch car manifested by Epic Aerospace.
Editor’s observe: This story was up to date at 8:15 p.m. ET on Feb. 26 with information of profitable spacecraft deployment.
