The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) latest mission to the moon is on its way, returning a blazing light to the Florida sky shortly after sunset on Feb. 26.
Intuitive Machines’s Athena lunar lander lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:16 p.m ET. The lunar lander made a clean separation from the Falcon rocket at approximately 8:01 p.m. ET. It will take about a week to reach the moon for a scheduled landing near the moon’s south pole on March 6.
Athena’s destination is a lunar plateau just 100 miles away from the south pole called Mons Mouton, going for the furthest southern lunar landing in American history. Mons Mouton is one of the possible landing sites for the Artemis III mission.
Officially dubbed IM-2, Athena’s mission is the second of Intuitive Machines’s lunar mission, following its lander named Odysseus a little over a year ago. IM-2 is also the latest example of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) efforts to lay the groundwork for a commercial lunar economy as part of its larger Artemis program to get humans back to the moon to stay.
IM-2 will conduct a 10-day mission on the moon, testing new technologies and gathering more data essential to achieving Artemis’s and CLPS’s goals.
Athena will be going to the moon with several different scientific instruments, including a drill, and retroreflector array, which will help give future spacecraft a permanent reference point on the moon’s surface, a small rover, and a rocket-powered drone called a “hopper” named Grace. It is called a hopper due to the hop-like flight path it is expected to take as it moves from landing point to landing point.
Grace’s main mission will be to get scientific readings from within a permanent shaded area within a nearby crater and test the agency’s ability to fly a drone on the moon.
“We need to get into those more hard-to-reach places,” he said. “In this case, we want to get to the bottom of a crater. We want to get into those permanently shadowed regions where we believe that resources, water, and other volatiles are there that we can go and eventually extract and use, And so a wheeled rover would be impractical ... thinking you can get down those steep slopes, over those cliff edges, down into those extreme temperatures, and then back up.”
Athena will also be equipped with the first 4G LTE cellular network on the moon provided by Nokia to connect the Athena lander with its rover and hopper. Nokia’s lunar network systems will be further updated for NASA’s Artemis III mission, set to be the first mission to land humans on the moon since Apollo 17.
“Nokia has done such a fantastic job of taking their terrestrial telecom for gene networks that connect billions of people and devices every single day, and they’re packaging it for space, and they’re going to use it on future Artemis missions and future human sustained presence on the Moon and Mars and beyond,” Thornblom said.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer will also be onboard as a rideshare, remaining in lunar orbit and mapping the distribution of different forms of water on the moon.
This was SpaceX’s 24th launch so far this year.
NASA continues to be in a space race with communist China to be the first to establish a permanent human presence on the lunar south pole.
The first manned mission of NASA’s Artemis program, Artemis II, is slated to launch in April 2026 and take a slingshot flight around the moon.
