Intuitive machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the company in Houston do it again, but this time keep the spacecraft upright?
When the spacecraft, called Odysseus, lay down on the moon last February, it was successful to communicate with the earth, although it had been overthrown on its side. It was the first commercially operated lander that reached the surface of the moon, and the first American vehicle that gently landed on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The second Lander of the company, called Athena, is now on the launch platform. This is what you need to know about Wednesday's flight.
When is the launch and how can I view it?
Athena and three other spacecraft launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 -rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on top. The launch is planned at 7:16 pm Eastern Time on 26 February. There is a chance of more than 95 percent in favorable weather.
If the weather or technical problems arise, backup options will be available during a four-day launch window. After that, the mission should be postponed by a month.
NASA will provide cover about the launch that starts about 45 minutes before the lift.
Where does Athena go?
If the launch takes place on Wednesday, the intuitive machines will try to land spacecraft on March 6 in Mons Mouton, a region about 100 miles from the South Pole of the Moon. That will be closer to the South Pole than every previous Maanlander.
What does Athena wear?
The most important load is an exercise for NASA as part of the commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Paying a commercial company such as intuitive machines to take something to the moon is cheaper than having NASA design and building its own spacecraft.
The drill is designed to dig up the soil to about three feet below the surface. It will extract moon bottom about four centimeters at a time. An instrument that is known as a mass spectrometer will then sniff around the drilled material for connections such as frozen water that easily turns into gases.
The Athena Lander also wears three robot -like robbers and a small flying “hopper” that will be used after landing.
The biggest Rover, known as the mobile autonomous prospecting platform, or MAPP, is part of a NASA-Fastinanced test of the first mobile network on the Moon. Nokia won financing of the space agency to test the technology, but then needed a way to move at least one antenna at a distance from the lander. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outpost to build the Rover, which is about the size of a small dog.
Lunar Outpost sold space on Mapp to other customers. One, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a small robber called Astroant, which will crawl around Mapp's top flat surface.
Athena will also implement a Rover called Yaoki, built by a Japanese company, Dymon, which is a little larger than a Mac Mini computer.
Intuitive machines built the Hopper as part of another NASA contract. The small rocket-driven vessel could offer new possibilities to explore long distances, similar to the way in which NASA's resourceful helicopter offered another way to explore areas that are not easily reached on the ground.
Helicopters cannot fly on the airless moon, but thrusters let the hopper fly long distances. It will also wear one of the Nokia -mobile antennas. The plan is to fly in one of the permanent shadowers of the moon.
An eclipse?!
The mission on the surface is planned for less than one Monday, or about 10 earth days, until the sun sets. Without solar energy, the batteries of the spacecraft will have more power without power.
But in the middle of Monday, on March 14 at about 2 hours east, the darkness will fall for a few minutes – a solar eclipse when the earth passes between the sun and the moon.
The solar energy-driven lander will have to remove current from his batteries during the Eclips, but should survive.
Why did the last land of intuitive machines fell over?
The Odysseus Lander should use a laser height meter to lead it to the surface of the moon. But due to supervision during the preparations for the launch, a safety switch for the device was never switched off, making that tool useless. Engineers in intuitive machines have hurriedly rewritten their landing software to use similar measurements of an experimental NASA instrument on the spacecraft. But they missed the updating of one important parameter in the computer code and the landing software ignored the data.
The spacecraft thus did not land aware of its exact height and only guides its distance above the surface based on horizontal speed calculated from camera images and measurements of gears in the speed of the spacecraft. The guesses were close enough that it did not crash, although it still moved horizontally. The landing gear broke and the spacecraft rotated.
The Athena Lander is almost identical to Odysseus-Oil what the company calls its Nova-C design and officials of the intuitive machines said they had tested the laser several times.
Which other spacecraft travel with Athena?
Three separate spacecraft run on the Falcon 9 rocket. They essentially benefit from extra cargo space in the rocket for a cheaper ride to space.
One, Lunar Trailblazer, has a lost NASA mission-accident $ 100 million designed to measure the distribution of water on the moon from a job.
While Athena will make a quick journey of a week to the moon, Lunar Trailblazer will take a relaxed, more economical path. If the launch takes place on Wednesday, it takes a little more than four months to reach the moon. (If the launch takes place on another day, the process changes and the journey can take as long as seven months.)
A second spacecraft, Odin, is a spacecraft in the microwave built by the California Astroforge company. It goes to an asteroid in the near-earth to investigate whether it can be full of valuable metals that can be mined in the future.
A third vehicle, Chimera Geo 1, is a spacecraft from Epic Aerospace from San Francisco, designed to place small satellites in distant jobs.
What else lands on the moon?
Athena is the third commercial Lander who was launched to the moon this year, although it is perhaps the second to arrive.
On January 15, a Falcon 9 -rocket was launched with the other two landers – Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace from Austin, Texas and resilience by ISPACE from Japan.
Blue Ghost, just like Athena, is part of the NASA CLPS program and is planned to land on March 2, before Athena. It is on the way to the mare Crision, a basin in the northeastern quadrant of the nearby side of the moon.
Windracht, also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 Lander, takes an indirect route and is expected to come to the Moon in May. The landing site is located near the center of Mare Frigoris, or the sea of cold, in the northern hemisphere of the moon. This will be the second attempt by ISPACE's second moon landing. The first mission, in 2023, crashed.
