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When Intuitive Machines became the first private space company to land on the moon, it was hailed as successful, despite its spacecraft breaking a leg and falling to its side.
Now, as the Houston-based company seeks to repeat the journey, its executives say they’ve made improvements to their new spacecraft, Athena, that should help it avoid the problems that impacted the mission in 2024.
“Landing on the moon is extremely difficult,” Trent Martin, senior vice president of Intuitive Machines’ space systems, told reporters. “Certainly we will be better this time than we were last time, but you never know what could happen.”
The mission, referred to as IM-2 or PRIME-1, is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, as early as Wednesday, Feb. 26. Neither NASA nor Intuitive Machines has announced a specific time for the liftoff, but the space agency intends to broadcast the event live with commentary. Another spacecraft, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, will also hitch a ride on the flight to orbit the moon and map locations of lunar water.
Credit: Intuitive Machines
When the uncrewed IM-2 launches, it will be the third lander en route to the lunar surface, joining Firefly Aerospace‘s Blue Ghost and ispace‘s Resilience, which are both currently orbiting the moon.
Firefly’s lander is the first NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission of the year. It is expected to attempt a landing on March 2. Intuitive Machines will follow closely behind, with a descent slated for March 6. The program has invested $2.6 billion in contracts with private-sector vendors to help deliver instruments to the moon and send back crucial data.
But landing on the moon remains onerous, underscored by the fact that Intuitive Machines is so far the only company — as opposed to a government space program — that has gotten there mostly intact. The moon’s exosphere provides virtually no drag to slow a spacecraft down as it approaches the ground. Furthermore, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot.
Credit: Intuitive Machines
A last-minute crisis almost ruined Intuitive Machine’s 2024 landing. Flight controllers had discovered a problem with the spacecraft’s navigation system just a few hours before touchdown. Mission leaders opted to take another lap around the moon, which bought them extra time to switch to a NASA laser-based system attached to the spacecraft as an experiment.
A combination of gravity and inertia factors also seemed to stymie the landing, said Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida. The Odysseus lander had reached the surface but wasn’t upright. That’s in part because everything on the moon is “six times tippier,” he said in a post on X then, formerly Twitter. The Japanese moon lander SLIM, short for Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon, experienced a similar outcome.
A snapshot from the Intuitive Machines landing revealed the spacecraft had broken a leg on the way down. The tilt had apparently caused an antenna to be blocked, forcing the team to use a backup with lower bandwidth to send back data.
“IM-1 was a success because we were able to broadcast data from the surface of the moon back to Earth, but,” Martin said, “we did end up on our side.”
Credit: SpaceX via Intuitive Machines
Following the mission, Intuitive Machines investigated everything that didn’t go as planned. The team determined an issue with the laser altimeter, a tool that measures exactly how high the surface is with a laser beam, ultimately leading to the harder-than-desired landing. Because of that issue, flight controllers were using the onboard cameras, which weren’t as precise.
Martin said the investigation resulted in 85 upgrades, including contingencies that should allow Athena to land up to 10 degrees off — perhaps more — and still complete the mission objectives. To be sure it would work, the team tested all of its deployment mechanisms with such a tilt in all different directions.
“Certainly we will be better this time than we were last time, but you never know what could happen.”
Intuitive Machines also addressed the previous communications issues. Tweaks to the spacecraft should allow it to land 30 degrees off-kilter and still have the high-gain antenna pointed back at Earth. Additionally, the company has upgraded its dishes on the ground for receiving data.
The lander’s NASA instruments include a drill and mass spectrometer, a device that identifies the kinds of particles in a substance. The tool is intended to measure gasses in the lunar soil at Mons Mouton, a plateau at the moon’s south pole where Athena will try to touch down.
But, after all is said and done, the lander has to be upright to use them. Still, Intuitive Machines says it’ll be a worthwhile trip.
“Let’s say something happened like last time, and we ended up on our side,” Martin said. “Obviously, we would not be able to deploy drills. We would not be able to deploy hoppers and rovers. However, there are lots of instruments on all of those systems that we would still be able to operate, just like last time.”
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Intuitive Machines landed a spacecraft on the moon in 2024, but it arrived tilted. The company says that won’t likely happen again.
