A few hours ago, the Nova-C Athena Moon lander blasted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission. After about 48 minutes, it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and set off on a course to the Moon, where it’s scheduled to attempt a landing on March 6. About 3 minutes later, NASA’s small Lunar Trailblazer satellite also separated from the rocket’s second stage, but its course is very different from Athena’s, so it will not reach the Moon until June.
Almost exactly one year after the landing of Odysseus, IM-1 mission’s lander, Intuitive Machines is starting a new Moon mission. This is the second of at least three Moon missions planned for as many Nova-C landers under a contract with NASA within the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The Odysseus mission was only partially successful because the lander had probably lost one of the legs that were supposed to keep it upright following a maneuver that turned out to be more brutal than scheduled.
Like Odysseus, the Athena lander was also placed directly into a Moon transfer orbit, which ensures a very quick journey, unlike other missions that follow more complex trajectories that require much longer times to reach the Moon’s orbit.
Athena is very similar to Odysseus, a relatively small lander of the Nova-C model: it’s 4.3 meters high and has a diameter of 1.6 meters for a weight of 675 kg. It carries NASA’s PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1), composed of two instruments: TRIDENT (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain), which aims to drill the lunar surface up to a meter deep, and MSolo (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations).
Athena also carries another smaller lander, the Micro Nova Hopper called Grace. It’s a sort of drone capable of hopping on the Moon’s surface and aims to study the Marston crater, near the landing area, with a spectrometer, in search of traces of hydrogen and therefore water. Athena also carries the small Japanese rover Yaoki.
The Lunar Trailblazer satellite, part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, was also designed to search for water on the Moon’s surface. Unlike the instruments carried by the Athena lander, it will do that from an orbit of about 100 kilometers high.
The Athena lander and the Lunar Trailblazer satellite are now on their way to the Moon. A complete success of the IM-2 mission would be important for Intuitive Machines to consolidate its position as a service provider for NASA to carry small, payloads that can be commercial to the Moon as part of the Artemis program.
