Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander set for touchdown on historic water-hunting mission

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A robotic lander named Athena is poised to make its final descent to the moon’s surface, potentially marking the second lunar touchdown for a US company this week.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which last year became the first private-sector company to soft-land a vehicle on the moon, said that its Athena spacecraft is on track to touch down at 11:32 a.m. CT (12:32 p.m. ET) Thursday.

A live stream of the event, cohosted by NASA and Intuitive Machines, is set to begin about an hour before landing.

If successful, the 15-foot-tall (4.6-meter-tall) Athena will join a lunar lander developed by another Texas-based company — Firefly Aerospace of Austin suburb Cedar Park — on the surface of the moon. Firefly’s Blue Ghost vehicle made a safe, upright touchdown early Sunday morning.

Both Athena and Blue Ghost are expected to operate on the moon’s near side, but the two spacecraft will be perched roughly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) apart, with Blue Ghost near the lunar equator and Athena situated close to the south pole — closer than any astronaut or vehicle has ventured before.

Lunar landings are exceedingly difficult feats. About half of all attempts, including those by government space agencies and commercial companies, have ended in failure.

Athena will need to complete an engine burn that will set it on a trajectory out of lunar orbit and toward the surface. The lander is then expected to coast for about an hour before it begins its final descent and will have to use sensors and cameras to navigate the crater-riddled terrain.

During its final descent, the vehicle must rapidly shed speed, reducing its velocity by about 4,000 miles per hour (1,800 meters per second) before hitting the ground.

The moon’s south pole is considered crucial to the modern space race because scientists believe it is home to vast stores of water ice. The ice could be converted to drinking water, breathable air or even rocket fuel for missions that journey deeper into the cosmos.

Athena is slated to land at a 60-mile-wide (100-kilometer-wide) plateau called Mons Mouton — which lies about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the lunar south pole. Then, the lander will get to work.

Athena is on a scouting mission of sorts. The vehicle will use an array of robotic equipment — including a drill, hopper and rover — to scour the nearby area for confirmation that water ice is stored across the region.

The lander is expected to operate for 10 days before lunar nightfall plunges it into darkness, rendering the spacecraft inoperable.

A shot at redemption

Before Intuitive Machines made history last year when its first lander, Odysseus — or “Odie,” as the startup’s employees called it — made a soft touchdown on the moon, only a handful of government space programs had pulled off that feat. The United States, China, India, Japan and the former Soviet Union were in that exclusive club.

But Odie’s trip, which also ventured near the south pole region, wasn’t perfect. Before landing, mission teams found that the laser rangefinder designed to help navigate the lunar terrain and precisely measure altitude was not correctly hardwired.

That misstep forced the company to rely on an experimental NASA payload, which happened to be on board, for navigational support to reach the lunar surface.

Ultimately, Odie tripped onto its side, leaving valuable communications antennae and solar panels pointed in inopportune directions. As a result, Odie powered down days earlier than planned.

Firefly briefly alluded to Odie’s wayward orientation during live coverage of its moon landing this week, declaring that its Blue Ghost lander was the “first fully successful” commercial vehicle to touch down on the moon.

Still, the companies have expressed support for each other.

“I’ll tell you something that is more exciting now than any other time in history is how many missions are flying to the moon,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus told CNN in February. “Two Texas companies flying landers to the moon that theoretically will be on the surface at the same time operating different missions on the moon — that’s just incredible for the United States.”

Firefly and Intuitive Machines are both contractors under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The CLPS program aims to spur private industry to develop relatively cheap robotic spacecraft that can explore the lunar surface before NASA sends its astronauts there later this decade.

NASA’s Artemis III mission aims to land humans on the moon for the first time in more than five decades by mid-2027.

Athena’s mission on the moon

Hours after touching down Thursday, the Athena lander is expected to deploy a rover it’s carrying that’s called Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, and built by Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost. The four-wheel, 22-pound (10-kilogram) vehicle will test new cellular communications equipment, work to create a 3D map of the moon’s surface, and take pictures.

The vehicle is also designed to collect a small soil sample. And though the sample — as well as the MAPP rover — will stay on the moon indefinitely, NASA has agreed to pay $1 to take ownership of the sample. It’s a symbolic move meant to mark the first-ever commercial sale of space resources.

Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus told CNN that the $1 from NASA is the only government funding the company will receive for this mission.

“This is our first shot, and the fact that this is a commercially funded rover with literally $1 from NASA … that’s already like a pretty darn good place to be,” Cyrus said.

After MAPP sets off, the Athena lander will deploy a miniature hopper — or a spacecraft designed to leap away from the landing site and explore a lunar crater to hunt for water. Intuitive Machines developed that vehicle with funding from NASA.

But the primary payload on board Athena is NASA’s PRIME-1 drill, which is designed to bear down into the moon’s surface, scour for water ice and analyze the soil as it goes.

If PRIME-1 can locate water just below the moon’s surface, it would be “extremely exciting,” Siegfried Eggl, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told CNN this week.

“If the drill would find a little bit of water-rich material right (near) the surface, that will be the best-case scenario,” Eggl said, “because it means wherever you go on the south pole, you don’t have to dive into craters, you can probably extract water really, really quickly.”

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