Kennedy Space Center – With the launch of SpaceX on Wednesday night, they sent both lander and orbiter on their way to the moon on ice hunts.
The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the intuitive machine NOVA-C Lunar Lander Athena on the IM-2 mission and the Lunar Trail Blazer satellite, built with Lockheed Martin at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was lifted from KSC’s launch pad 39-A at 7:17pm
The main payload of Athena is NASA’s Prime-1 drill. This represents ice mining experiment 1 for polar resources. It digs holes in the moon’s Antarctic, pulls up the moon’s regolith from a person about three feet deep, and analyzes volatiles, which are evaporating substances such as carbon dioxide and frozen water.
Meanwhile, the lunar pioneers are prepared to look closely at previously detected ice deposits and circumnavigate the moon’s north and Antarctica for about 20 months.
Nikki Fox, a sec administrator at NASA’s Science Mission Bureau, said: “We are sending astronauts back to the moon and preparing to have a lasting presence there, so we are ultimately heading towards the next frontier of humanity: Mars.”
She said it is NASA’s job to catalog all the resources on the ground before humans arrive, “establishing lessons learned from the Apollo era to ensure safety and promote scientific discovery and innovation.”
Also, along the board, we headed over the moon on the Odin spacecraft of the commercial company Astroforge to a nearby asteroid named 2022 OB5. The final payload is that the Sherpa-es exceed the track-moving vehicle.
Athena is the second Lunar Lander in an intuitive Houston-based machine. The first-named Odysseus managed the first commercial landing of history on the IM-1 mission in 2024, but partially tilted after one of the landing legs was damaged when it hit the surface.
Both IM-1 and IM-2 are partially funded with funding from NASA’s Commercial Wheel Services Program (CLPS). The program appears to make NASA a client of what they hope to become a sustainable monthly economy. Although they paid a $62.5 million intuitive machine to carry Prime 1 drills and several other NASA experiments, the company was able to offset costs by placing other companies side by side for more payloads.
Companies need to line up launch providers, build landers, and carry out all mission communications.
If Athena begins either Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, the landing attempt will take place on March 6th. The CLPS mission, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, is set to land by Direfly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which is targeting early Sunday mornings.
Athena appears from the Antarctic of the Moon up to 5 degrees.
“It’s a scientifically strategic place and will return exciting data because of its origin,” Fox said. It is 20,000 feet higher than adjacent features and is higher than features that have not been touched by the effects of the moon for billions of years.
She said the space has a huge ring of craters around the base, with a cliff-like edge descending into an area of permanent darkness. It is also on a hill with a blanket covered in small rocks and craters that frequently freeze shadows.
“I hope it offers an extraordinary science opportunity in an extraordinary place,” she said.
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A third landing from Ispace Japan, which is not affiliated with NASA, is also heading for the moon, but has not arrived for several more months.
For intuitive machines, the company accepts the complexity of what it hopes to be a second landing, and accepts one without a chip, CEO Stephen Altemus said.
“We want to have a successful launch and soft landing on the moon,” he said. “We can do it twice in a year in a row. Something says in a fixed price contract environment.”
To offset costs, Lander also has Prime-1 drills and six other NASA CLPS payloads, plus payloads from Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outspost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd. and the German Aerospace Center.
He said a few of these Mark Vanguard industry moments as well.
“When we land, we deploy a rover that tests the cellular signal. We have a hopper that explodes from the side of the lander and dives into a shadow crater forever.
The complexity of the mission will also be the first in Antarctica.
“It’s really exciting to be able to say the initial purpose from the first mission. Can you really go to the moon? Can you really do this at such a low cost in such a short time?” he said. “So what we did was create such a complicated mission in the second mission. We’ll take on more objectives. Do your best and do something even better, right? And, you know, being on a pad ready to go here feels good.”
Athena Lander was active until the sun set on the moon on March 16th, Lander lost communication with the Earth, and Athena could not withstand the cold of the moon night.
While Athena is superficially busy, Lunar Trailblazer is right behind, but it will take several months to set up a selected orbital mission under the small, innovative mission of NASA’s Planetary Exploration (Simplex) program in 2019.
While being managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin built a spacecraft where NASA’s imaging spectrometer and thermal mapper functioned.
Lockheed’s Tim Preyser, the chief engineer of the company’s commercial sales line, said the mission is one of the footholds of a larger lunar exploration campaign, including trying to place a power grid on the moon.
“Before you put something like infrastructure on the moon, it will be very important to understand where the water is, not just for human life support, but also in the field of what you can imagine,” he said. “But I think it’s mainly rocket fuel.”
To that end, Trailblazer’s job is to “know where that water is, what it is, what it is, what its shape is, enable future missions and start building that infrastructure.”
Original issue: February 26, 2025, 3:54pm EST
