This NASA-backed lander is heading for the moon on a history-making search for water

The AstroForge Odin spacecraft is seen inside testing and development facilities. (Courtesy Astroforge via CNN Newsource)

Two robotic landers, one from the United States and the other from Japan, are currently in transit toward the moon — and this week a third will join them.

The latest contender is a standout: The spacecraft, called Athena, is built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which so far is the only private sector company on Earth that has previously made a safe touchdown on the moon.

The lunar lander, which will ride to orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is set to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:17 p.m. ET on Wednesday. The space agency will live stream the event on NASA+.

Athena, on a mission dubbed IM-2, will later aim to make a daring descent toward the moon’s south pole. The region is considered crucial to the modern lunar space race. Scientists suspect it is rich with stores of water ice, a resource that can be converted to breathable air, drinking water or even rocket fuel.

As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, Intuitive Machines’ lander will be equipped with a suite of technology — including a drill, a small robotic “hopper” and a tiny rover — that will allow it to scour the treacherous, crater-riddled terrain and determine whether there is evidence of water.

“It’s very dynamic with a lot of moving parts,” Intuitive Machines cofounder and CEO Steve Altemus said of the mission in an interview earlier this month.

The Athena spacecraft, a six-legged lander roughly the size of a telephone booth, will take about a week to reach its destination. The lander will have a truncated trajectory toward the moon compared with the landers that launched last month: Austin, Texas-based Firefly’s Blue Ghost, which is slated to land this weekend, and a lander from Japan-based Ispace, which won’t touch down on the moon before this spring.

Second moon shot with bigger goals

Intuitive Machines made history last year when its first lunar lander, Odysseus — or “Odie,” as it was called by the startup’s employees — made a soft touchdown on the lunar surface.

Odie succeeded where many others had failed: About half of all lunar landers do not reach their intended destination or crash-land. And before the IM-1 mission, as Odie’s journey was called, only a few nations’ civil space programs had soft-landed spacecraft on the moon.

But the trip wasn’t perfect. A mission-threatening problem arose when Intuitive Machines engineers realized they had not hardwired a rangefinder — or laser designed to measure precise altitude — correctly. That misstep forced the company to rely on an experimental NASA payload that happened to be on board for navigational support.

And while Odie safely touched down near the Malapert A crater in the moon’s south pole region, the vehicle landed on its side, tipped over on the edge of a crater.

Mission teams were able to reconfigure the spacecraft’s communications method in order to retrieve valuable data from NASA’s six onboard science instruments. But the vehicle did not operate as long as Intuitive Machines had expected it would.

With the IM-1 mission, Odie sought to test out several navigation technologies and gather scientific data using the NASA science instruments. Odie only had to perch in place as it transmitted data back home.

With IM-2, however, the stakes are higher. The Athena lander comes equipped with several smaller robots it will deploy as well as a drill expected to bear down into the moon’s surface, scouring for water ice.

“This is a much more complex and dynamic and exciting mission,” Altemus said. “It’s one thing to land on the moon. And now we’re down to business on the second attempt.”

Journey to Mons Mouton

After reaching space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, Athena will begin a “a high-energy fastball pitch towards the moon,” as Altemus previously described the trajectory.

The journey will include several nail-biting moments.

“Being a steely eyed missile man, I don’t know that we freak out — but there are moments of increased anxiety,” Altemus said. “We’ll see when we go to light the engine the first time that level of anxiety. Everything (has to) come together perfectly to go right, to fire the engine, to put us on our way to the moon. I think that’s the first one where it’s really going to be a knot in our stomach.”

At one point on its trip, Athena will also experience a solar eclipse, as Earth moves in front of the sun and blots out the light.

“We’re going to get degraded power as we fly in the dark with no sun,” Altemus said, “and when that happens, we’ll have to turn off some extra equipment (to conserve power).”

The spacecraft will separate from the rocket after reaching what’s called a trans-lunar injection orbit, which is an elliptical path that extends about 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometres) above Earth. Athena will then light its own engines and nudge itself into the moon’s gravitational well.

After that milestone, Athena will deploy the smaller spacefaring vehicles that are hitching a ride on board the spacecraft. One is the NASA-made Lunar Trailblazer probe, which seeks to map the distribution of water on the surface as it orbits the moon. Another is a microwave-size spacecraft developed by California-based startup AstroForge that will continue into deep space in the hopes of scouting an asteroid for precious metals.

About one week after launching from Florida, Athena will then make its final descent.

The lander’s destination is Mons Mouton — a plateau near the lunar south pole.

And it’s “the closest landing site to the moon’s south pole to date,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during a February 7 briefing about IM-2’s science objectives.

Mons Mouton also offers Athena “the Goldilocks zone for sunlight,” Fox added.

Though many areas of the lunar south pole are permanently in shadow — the precise locations where water ice may remain perpetually frozen — Mons Mouton offers enough sunlight to “power a roughly 10-day mission while maintaining a clear view to Earth” to allow communication with the spacecraft, Fox said.

Athena’s landing site will be “an extremely cold environment that we believe contains volatiles — which are chemical substances that can easily change from a liquid, to a solid, to a gas,” Fox said. “These volatiles may contain trapped water ice.”

But safely arriving at this destination will be a challenge. The areas closest to the moon’s south pole are pockmarked with impact craters, making it difficult to find a patch of flat, even terrain that’s safe for landing.

“IM-2 has to be a lot more accurate than IM-1,” said Intuitive Machines’ navigation lead, Mike Hansen, during a company podcast interview last year. “So, IM-1 we could get away with about a kilometre footprint. IM-2 is down to 50 metres (164 feet).”

What Athena will do

Altemus said the company is targeting March 6 for touchdown.

Then, the real work begins.

Immediately, “we’ll begin the campaign to drill into the surface, and we’ll try to get 10 drill cycles (and we’ll) go 10 centimetres at a time, all the way to a metre (3.3 feet) depth,” Altemus said, describing how NASA’s water-hunting drill, called Prime-1, will operate.

The tiny robotic Micro Nova Hopper on board IM-2 — developed by Intuitive Machines — will pop off the Athena lander. Named Grace after the late pioneer of software engineering Grace Murray Hopper, the diminutive craft will conduct several hops that reach up to 50 metres (164 feet) in the air before diving into a nearby crater that lives in permanent shadow.

There, the robot will attempt to detect ice before hopping back out of the crater and transmitting data back home.

A four-wheeled, microwave-size rover developed by Lunar Outpost will also roll out from Athena, packed with its own instruments and experimental technology. The robotic explorer will even carry a smaller, matchbook-size rover, called AstroAnt.

The Lunar Outpost rover and Grace hopper will also each test out the use of cellular network on the moon as part of a NASA-sponsored experiment spearheaded by Nokia.

All told, the IM-2 Athena lander is expected to operate for about 10 days on the moon.

“It’s gonna be very dynamic, and a busy schedule,” Altemus said.