The private nave Athena, intuitive machines and with NASA load, tries to perch today on the moon

The Moon will receive what its third robot built by a private company will receive today: Athena. Created by the company based in Houston Intuitive Machines, the ship will be the second of the company to alunize in our natural satellite, the new ‘promised land’ in which the main spatial powers, such as the US and China, have put their eyes.

Right now the landing module, a Nova-C vehicle called Athena and similar to its predecessor, the Odysseus ship, is flying in the IM-2 mission as part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Load Services Program (CLPS), which hires private companies to carry useful scientific and technological loads of the agency to the lunar surface and prepare the land for the Artemis program, the return of astronauts to the moon.

This Thursday at 18.32 Spanish time the world will see if Intuitive Machines is able to fulfill the contract. Alassage will be broadcast live from ABC, as well as in the NASA and Intuitive Machines channels from 17.30.

The IM-2 mission, with a cost of 62.5 million dollars, was launched on February 26 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket of Spacex from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a trip of about 4.5 days, Athena reached the lunar orbit on Monday (March 3), where the spacecraft and the intuitive machines operators in the mission control have continued to prepare the landing module for its descent to the surface.

The maneuvers

When the time comes, Athena will have to perform a complex dance to fly throughout her career to landing. From the dark side of the moon, out of the reach of the usual communications, the landing module will make an ignition of a descent trajectory to reduce its orbit and put it in a flight trajectory to the chosen place, Mons Mouton, about 60 kilometers from the South Pole, which would mean the point further south of the moon ever reached by a human mission.

At this point, Athena will fly autonomously until your landing, using image systems and on -board sensors to analyze the land under it and make navigation decisions. Once the communication is recovered, the braking maneuvers will begin in which it will turn on and reduce the speed of its landing engine until the spacecraft reaches approximately one mile away (about 1.6 kilometers) of its final destination on the moon. Then, the landing module will be put in vertical position using its main engine to begin a phase of detection and avoidance of hazards in order to determine an adequate and precise landing place.

Then, Athena will enter its vertical descent phase and then in its terminal descent phase, respectively, to reduce the speed of its fall from about 3 meters per second to one meter per second once it reaches approximately 9 meters from the surface. For the terminal phase, the landing module changes to only internal guide (without cameras on board) and will descend the last meters to touch the surface.

After landing, intuitive machines awaits a 15 second confirmation period for mission controllers to complete the final checks. If everything goes as planned, Athena will then begin its mission on the surface of the moon.

The landing place

Athena’s winging point is Mons Mouton, a region close to the South Pole of the Moon to which human technology has never reached. There he will try to certify the suspicion that scientists have that there could be ice deposits. This and other resources would be important for future lunar settlements, in which having water available on the ground could mean a considerable cost reduction (because sending water to the moon would be heavy and, therefore, more expensive). In addition, it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used to make rocket fuel, for example. Through CLPS missions such as IM-2, NASA expects to better understand the lunar environment and its use to support future astronauts.

IM-2 will look for water ice and other resources present on the lunar surface and just below it. Athena carries the Ice Mining Experiment of Polar Resources-1 (Prime-1) of the NASA, consisting of two main components: the regalitic ice drill to explore new land (TRIDES) and the mass spectrometer for lunar operations observation (MSOLO).

Trident will excavate on the surface and Msolo will analyze the results. Prime-1 will recover a sample of up to 3 feet (1 m) under the surface to look for frozen water and the mass spectrometer on board will analyze that sample to determine if the water ice is there.

A secondary spacecraft called Grace, named for the scientific and mathematical pioneer Grace Hopper, ‘will jump’ on the lunar surface on a radius of 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of the ATENEA’s landing place, and will explore the section permanently in the shadow of a nearby crater. The mission also carries a mini-arver, the mobile autonomous prospecting platform (MAPP), built by the company of Colorado Lunar Outpost. These three robots will keep in touch using the first 4G/LTE network, another payload on board IM-2, which was provided by Nokia Bell Labs.

Another experiment aboard Athena is the set of laser retroreflectors (LRA), a demonstration of passive technology that does not require a source of energy or mechanical components. Eight mirrors fixed outside the ship will prove the reflection of the lasers as a means of navigation reference for near and incoming spacecraft, similar to the reflectors that are placed on the tracks of an airport. Athena’s landing module will also release a smaller explorer, called Yooki, from the Japanese company Dymon.

Ten days of experiments

After landing, Athena will operate on the lunar surface for about ten days, until the lunar night falls on Mons Mouton and the darkness (and the extreme cold) seizes the spacecraft. Before that, however, the landing module will witness how the earth advances to the sun for a solar eclipse on the lunar surface on March 14, at approximately 8 in the morning (Spanish time). Then, once the batteries of the landing module are sold out and the sun has put behind the lunar horizon, Athena’s mission will end.

However, Intuitive Machines has much more planned: the company has already obtained more NASA clps contracts and is currently planning to the IM-4 mission.