Second Intuitive Machines Mission Heads to the Moon – Sky & Telescope

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has successfully launched with the second set of Moon-bound payloads of the year.

The launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurred at 7:16 p.m. EST / 00:16 UT. Aboard is private space company Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Nova-C lander as well as NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1), along with a collection of smaller ride-share missions.

The spacecraft separated from the second stage booster shortly after launch and is reported in good health.

This is Intuitive Machines’ second lunar landing attempt. The company is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which awards contracts for platforms to deliver NASA experiments to the Moon. In the company’s first mission (IM-1), a Nova-C lander named Odysseus landed on the Moon last year, but it made a lopsided landing at the Malapert A Crater site, with limited success for its payloads.

The first try for another CLPS company, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, failed to reach the Moon entirely and reentered Earth’s atmosphere shortly after its January 2024 launch. Another CLPS awardee, Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission, is set to attempt a lunar landing this coming weekend.

The current IM-2 mission features another Nova-C lander, this time named Athena. Athena is set to land at the Mons Mouton region near the lunar south pole.

What’s Onboard IM-2

The highest-profile payload on IM-2 is NASA’s PRIME 1 experiment. Designed to investigate ice at the lunar south pole, the experiment consists of the Mass Spectrometer for Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) and The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) ice drill.

“NASA’s PRIME 1 will explore the Moon’s subsurface to identify lunar resources, testing technologies for extracting and analyzing soil,” says PRIME 1 project manager Jacqueline Quinn (NASA). “PRIME 1 is expected to operate for at least 72 hours.”

PRIME 1 features a meter-long drill, which, once PRIME 1 is deployed, will penetrate into the lunar surface and (hopefully) bring regolith mixed with ice to the surface for analysis. The plan for MSolo is to measure any water ice as it sublimates on exposure to the surface vacuum.

The instruments will also observe the lunar surface during the total lunar eclipse on the night of March 13-14, when Earth will briefly block out the Sun from the Moon’s perspective. “MSolo will attempt to monitor molecular hopping [movement of molecules on the lunar surface] during this event, and the TRIDENT drill will attempt to take down-hole temperature readings,” Quinn explains. “Of course, this is all contingent on power availability. The eclipse is expected to be several hours long.”

Athena will also deploy a small, hopping “micro rover,” also built by Intuitive Machines. Named Grace, after the pioneering mathematician and computer scientist Grace Hopper, the rover was funded as part of NASA’s Tipping Point Program, which aims to develop technology for exploring the moon. Grace will conduct five rocket-powered hops carrying a light weight — a feat that could eventually help explore permanently shadowed areas on the Moon, such as polar craters and lava tubes.

Also along for the ride is Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), another rover that will travel with Athena to the lunar surface, where it will take temperature measurements and collect regolith. Atop MAPP is another tiny, matchbox-size rover named AstroAnt — this one won’t touch the lunar surface but will instead roam across MAPP, taking contactless measurements of its thermal radiator.

Both Grace and MAPP will communicate with Athena using cellular networking equipment provided by Nokia, another technology demonstration.

Also onboard is Yaoki, a Japanese micro rover that weighs only 1.1 pounds (498 grams).

Other ride-shares aboard the Falcon 9 rocket, but conducting separate missions, include:

• NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer: As part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEX) program, this spacecraft will search for and map lunar water ice from low orbit.
• AstroForge’s Odin: This spacecraft will head to asteroid 2022 OB₅, arriving in 11 months for a flyby from a distance of 1 kilometer.
• Exolaunch’s CHIMERA-GEO: This satellite will demonstrate the feasibility of placing a 16U cubesat in geosynchronous orbit.

Next up for Intuitive Machines is its third mission, IM-3, set for October of this year. IM-3 will carry a robotic trio, the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers (CADRE), to the enigmatic lunar swirl Reiner Gamma.

Meanwhile, IM-2 is set to land on the Moon around March 6th, less than a week after Firefly’s Blue Ghost landing on March 1st. Watch for a busy week of lunar landings in early March.