WASHINGTON — The second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines is set to launch, taking to the moon NASA and commercial payloads as well as several rideshare spacecraft.
At a Feb. 25 briefing, NASA and Intuitive Machines said they were still working towards a launch of the IM-2 mission on the evening of Feb. 26 on a Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center.
Curiously, they declined to give a specific launch time, deferring to SpaceX, which did not participate in the briefing. SpaceX has not published a launch time for the mission as of early Feb. 26, but other sources, including the website of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex that is selling launch viewing tickets, list a launch time of 7:17 p.m. Eastern.
The mission has a four-day launch period, Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, said at the briefing. A launch in the first three days of the window would set up a landing attempt at Mons Mouton in the south polar region of the moon March 6 around midday Eastern time, he said, while a launch on the last day would lead to a landing attempt March 7.
The IM-2 lander, called Athena by Intuitive Machines, is carrying NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) payload as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. PRIME-1 features a drill designed to penetrate up to a meter into the surface and a spectrometer to measure any volatiles, like water ice, the drill passes through below the surface.
In addition to PRIME-1, the lander is carrying a laser retroreflector, a passive instrument similar to those NASA has flown on other lunar landers as part of CLPS.
Intuitive Machines is flying several commercial payloads on IM-2, including its own Micro Nova Hopper, a vehicle designed to hop across the lunar surface using its own propulsion system. The hopper, named Grace, carries a camera system and instruments the German aerospace agency DLR and Hungarian company Puli Space.
Martin said they hope to perform five hops of Grace, which could include going into a crater near the planned landing site. It will “demonstrate the technology of this hopping capability, to hop down into places where wheeled vehicles cannot go,” he said.
Another commercial payload is a communications system from Nokia, which will test the ability to use 4G/LTE networks on the moon. It will attempt communications both with the Grace hopper and another commercial payload, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform rover from Lunar Outpost.
Other commercial payloads on IM-2 is a very small rover, called Yaoki, from Japanese company Dymon Co. Ltd.; Freedom, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings; and thermal protection technologies from Columbia Sportwear.
Intuitive Machines purchased the entire Falcon 9 for the IM-2 launch, which resulted in an extra 800 to 900 kilograms of payload capacity to go into a translunar injection trajectory, Martin said. The company is carrying three rideshare payloads on the launch on an adapter ring separate from the lander.
One of those payloads is NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, a smallsat that will take a low-energy trajectory over the next four months before entering lunar orbit in early July. The 200-kilogram spacecraft will measure the distribution of water on the moon using an imaging spectrometer and thermal mapper.
“Our data set is going to answer fundamental questions about water on the moon and provide maps for the next generation of landed lunar robotic and astronaut missions,” said Bethany Ehlmann, the Caltech professor who is the principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer, at the briefing. That includes providing additional context for the measurements made by the PRIME-1 instrument on the IM-2 lander.
AstroForge, an asteroid mining company, is flying its Odin spacecraft as another secondary payload on the IM-2 launch, sending the spacecraft towards the near Earth asteroid 2022 OB5 for a lunar flyby about 300 days later. Epic Aerospace’s Chimera orbital transfer vehicle is the other rideshare payload on the launch.
Those commercial payloads supplement the NASA CLPS award for the IM-2 mission, which when awarded in 2020 was worth $47 million. Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said at the briefing that the CLPS task order is worth $62.5 million. The increase, he said, came from several changes NASA made to the original order, including buying data from the Grace hopper.
IM-2 is the second lunar lander mission for Intuitive Machines, launching just over a year after the IM-1 mission made to the lunar surface, although leaning on its side. That flawed landing was blamed on a laser altimeter that was inoperable because safety devices were not removed before launch as intended, depriving the lander of accurate altitude data.
“We identified 85 specific things that didn’t go like we wanted to on IM-1,” Martin said, all of which were addressed for IM-2. That included the laser altimeter as well as inaccurate navigation data that resulted in the lander going into a much lower orbit around the moon than planned.
He said the company will augment position data obtained from its own commercial network of ground stations with the “gold standard” of data from NASA’s Deep Space Network to more accurately determine its location in space. The laser altimeter, he added, has been tested on the ground several times, including during final launch preparations in Florida. “We’re pretty confident those things won’t happen again.”
