A SpaceX launch later this month will send a new type of lunar explorer to the moon. IM-2, the second moon mission by Houston company Intuitive Machines, will lift off from Florida’s Space Coast during a four-day window that opens on Feb. 26.
If all goes to plan, the Athena lander will touch down on a plateau just 100 miles from the moon’s south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, and IM-2 will prospect for this valuable resource with the help of some innovative ride-along robots, including a pioneering hopper nicknamed Gracie. Gracie is a joint effort between Intuitive Machines and NASA, which contributed $41 million toward developing the 77-pound robot.
The robot is named after Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist and mathematician who passed away in 1992. Gracie will deploy from the Athena lander and perform a total of five hops, using its thrusters to launch itself across the lunar surface. These leaps will get progressively higher, with the first reaching a maximum of 65 feet and subsequent hops reaching up to 330 feet.
One of the mission’s primary objectives is to explore a permanently shadowed crater known as Crater H, which lies about 1,650 feet from Athena’s landing site and is approximately 65 feet deep. Intuitive Machines aims to maintain communications with Gracie while it’s on the crater floor using another IM-2 payload: Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System, which will establish the first-ever 4G/LTE network on the moon. If communications are lost, the hopper is designed to hop back out into the light after 45 minutes or when surrounding temperatures reach a minimum threshold.
Gracie is primarily a technology demonstration to show that exploration of extreme lunar environments can be accomplished using technologies other than traditional rovers.
Testing new lunar landing tech
In addition to these mechanical tests, Gracie will gather potentially valuable data with an onboard “water snooper” instrument to scout for water in its surroundings.
The hopper also includes cameras so that the mission could provide clear views of its lunar leaps. NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 will perform more serious prospecting work supporting the mission. PRIME-1 includes a drill that will grab samples from up to 3.3 feet underground and a mass spectrometer to analyze those samples for the presence of water and other interesting compounds.
Also aboard the Athena lander is the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, a 22-pound rover built by the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. MAPP carries payloads, including high-resolution optical and thermal cameras, to create detailed 3D imagery of the polar region it will explore. Additionally, it will collect lunar regolith and house a smaller rover, the “AstroAnt,” a prototype swarm robot developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which will gather temperature data as MAPP moves.
Another tech-demonstrating robot onboard is a 17.6-ounce rover built by the Japanese company Dymon. If all goes to plan, Athena will touch down on March 6 and operate on the lunar surface for about 10 Earth days. It will end its life once the sun sets at its polar locale, cutting off its solar power supply. Intuitive Machines’ first moon mission, IM-1, made history with its Odysseus lander in February 2024.
Odysseus, however, landed too hard, breaking a landing leg and tipping partway onto its side. Despite this, the mission marked a significant achievement as a privately built spacecraft’s first successful lunar landing since 1972. This upcoming mission with Athena and Gracie embarks on an exciting venture, potentially paving the way for future explorations using similar technologies.
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