The intuitive machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can Houston’s company do it again, but keep the spacecraft standing up this time?
The company’s second Lander, named Athena, started Wednesday night in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is now on a arc path to the moon.
The spacecraft was activated, but then followed several minutes of anxiety when it was late to check. Eventually, the data from the detector arrived, accompanied by relief in controlling the mission of intuitive machines.
On March 6, the spacecraft will try to land on Mons Mouton, an area about 100 miles from the south pole of the Moon. This will be closer to the South Pole from any previous spacecraft has landed.
When the first Lander of the intuitive machines, Odysseus, fell to the moon last February, managed to communicate with the Earth, even though he had been overthrown by his side. It was the first commercially operated Lander to reach the surface of the moon and the first American vehicle to gently landed on the moon by Apollo 17 in 1972.
The main payload to Athena is a drill for NASA as part of the Lunar Lunar Merchant Service Program. Paying a commercial company such as intuitive machines to get something on the moon is cheaper for NASA than designing and building its own spacecraft.
The drill is designed to dig about three feet below the surface, pulling the lunar soil about four inches at a time and throwing it on a pile on the surface. An instrument known as a mass spectrometer will smell around the perforated material for compounds such as frozen water that is easily converted into gases.
Athena Lander also carries three robotic rovers and a small “funnel” that will grow after landing.
The largest Rover, known as a mobile autonomous search platform, or MAPP, is part of a trial funded by NASA on the first mobile phone network on the moon. Nokia won funding from the space office to test technology, but then needed a way to move at least one antenna some distance from Lander. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outpost to build the Rover, which is about the size of a small dog.
The lunar prison sold Mapp space to other customers. One, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a tiny Rover called Astroant, which will crawl on the top flat surface of the Mapp.
Athena will also develop a Rover called Yaoki, built by a Japanese company, Dymon, which is slightly larger than a Mac mini computer.
The intuitive machines created the funnel as part of another NASA Convention. The small rocket -powered boat could offer new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to the way the NASA inventive helicopter to Mars provided a different way to explore areas that were not easily reached on the ground.
In the moonless moon, helicopters cannot fly, but promoters will allow the hopper to fly long distances. It will also carry one of Nokia’s mobile antennas. The plan is to fly to one of the permanently shaded moon craters.
Why was the latest Lander of intuitive machines overturned?
Odysseus Lander had to use a laser altitude to guide him on the surface of the moon. But because of the supervision during launch preparations, a safety switch for the device was never turned off, making the tool useless. Engineers in intuitive machines hastily rewrite their landing software to use similar measurements from an experimental NASA experimental instrument on the spacecraft. But they lost updating a basic parameter in the computer code and landing software ignored the data.
The spacecraft landed thus ignoring its precise altitude, only guessing its distance above the surface based on the horizontal speed calculated by camera images and acceleration measurements at the speed of the spacecraft. The speculations were close enough to not collapse, though it was still moving horizontally. The landing tool broke, and the spacecraft was overthrown.
Athena Lander is almost identical to Odysseus-each one is what the company calls the design of Nova-C-and the intuitive employees said they had tried the laser many times.
What other spacecraft travels with Athena?
Three more separate spacecraft lead to the Falcon 9 rocket. They essentially utilize the extra useful load on the rocket for a cheaper stroll through space.
One, the Lunar Trailblazer, is a NASA mission that has lost $ 100 million-about $ 100 million-designed to measure water distribution on the moon from the orbit.
While Athena will make a quick one -week trip to the moon, the Lunar Trailblazer will take a more relaxed, efficient route. If the launch takes place on Wednesday, it will take only four months to reach the moon. (If the launch appears on a different day, the orbit changes and the journey could be as long as seven months.)
A second spacecraft, Odin, is a microwave space boat made by Astroforge in California. It will head to an asteroid almost land to consider whether it can be full of precious metals that could be mined in the future.
A third vehicle, Chimera Geo 1, is a spacecraft from San Francisco’s epic aerospace designed to place small satellites in distant orbits.
An eclipse?!
Shipment to the surface is scheduled to last for less than a lunar day, or about 10 days of the Earth, until the sun is adjusted. Without solar energy, the batteries of the spacecraft will run out.
But in the middle of the lunar day, on March 14 at about 2am. East hour, darkness will fall for a few minutes – an eclipse when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon.
The solar -powered solar should derive energy from its batteries during the eclipse, but it should survive.
What else soon is on the moon?
Athena is the third commercial land that started to the moon this year, though it may be the second to arrive.
On January 15th, a Falcon 9 rocket launched with the transfer of the other two Landers – Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace to Austin, Texas and the durability from Japan’s ISPACE.
Blue Ghost, like Athena, is part of NASA’s CLPS program and is scheduled to land on March 2, in front of Athena. It heads to Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quarter of the nearby side of the moon.
The durability, also known as Lander Mission 2 Hakuto-R, takes an indirect route and is expected to reach the moon in May. The landing location is located near the center of Mare Frigoris, or in the Cold Sea, in the northern hemisphere of the moon. This will be the second ispace landing attempt. His first mission, in 2023, crashed.
