In March, the Moon will be subjected to a real invasion of probes sent from Earth. Today at 03:16 Moscow time, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent two new devices to the Moon – a landing and an orbital one. Both probes will search for signs of water on the satellite, which should become the basis for the operation of long-term lunar bases.
Image source: SpaceX
Both probes successfully deployed after launch and were placed on lunar approach trajectories. The first stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle returned safely to the barge in the ocean. This was its ninth flight. The booster launched the Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander and NASA Lunar Trailblazer lunar orbiter into space at four-minute intervals. If all goes according to plan, the Athena lander will descend to the moon’s surface near the moon’s south pole around March 6.
This is Intuitive Machines’ second mission under contract with NASA. The first was partially successful, as the Nova-C Odyssey lander sent to the moon a year ago tipped over on landing. The company hopes to have learned from the first mission and land the new module without a crash.
Athena carries 10 NASA science instruments, most of which are designed to search for traces of water ice on the moon. NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter will conduct a similar study from the moon’s orbit. The data will complement the information from the moon’s surface and help create a more complete map of the moon’s water ice deposits.
It is interesting to note that the Athena landing module carries two small lunar rovers on board. One of them is made by Intuitive Machines — it is a robotic “grasshopper”. The Grace robot will be able to jump to the bottom of craters, where it is almost impossible for a wheeled vehicle to reach. It is highly likely that water ice is preserved in the eternal shadow of craters for millions and even billions of years. The robot will be able to move away from the landing module by about 1.6 km. A built-in inertial navigation module, a star tracker and a lidar will help it navigate on the Moon.
The second lunar rover is essentially a mobile repeater. The MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) lunar rover was created by Lunar Outpost. The robot’s transceiver equipment was developed by Nokia Bell Labs and is based on serial equipment for existing 4G/LTE networks. When Grace leaves the communication zone with Athena, the MAPP platform will help it maintain a connection. Overall, this will be a test of the possibility of deploying base cellular stations in lunar conditions, which will be useful in the future.
The lander’s primary science instrument is called PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1). It consists of two separate instruments: a regolith drill (TRIDENT) and a mass spectrometer for analyzing samples (MSolo). The pair will work together to collect and analyze a core sample extracted from beneath the lunar surface. TRIDENT will mine material from depths of up to one meter, while MSolo will analyze the sample for compounds such as water and carbon dioxide.
Image source: Intuitive Machines
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $62.5 million for the Athena module, more than the original contract price of $47 million. Unexpected difficulties arose during the development process. NASA also paid the company to provide lunar temperature data, the first contract ever for scientific data obtained by a private entity. The lander will stay on the moon for about 10 days. It will not survive the lunar night.
Two other devices were previously launched to the Moon: the Ghost Riders lander from Firefly Aerospace and the Japanese Resilience lander from iSpace. The Firefly lander is scheduled to land on the lunar surface this coming Sunday, March 2. The Japanese lander is moving along a circular trajectory and will arrive at the Moon in about three months. Resilience will collect samples of lunar dust for NASA, but will not deliver them to Earth. This will happen in one of the next missions. But there will be plenty of events on the Moon in the coming days that we will be watching with interest.