February 10, 20254 min readAthena, Next U.S. Commercial Moon Lander, Is Set for Spectacular Lunar ScienceIn partnership with NASA, the Intuitive Machines lander Athena will send a water-seeking drill, a pogo-sticking crater probe and other novel technologies to the moonBy Gayoung Lee edited by Lee BillingsAn artists rendering of an Intuitive Machines lander making its descent to the lunar surface near the moons south pole. Intuitive Machines and Nokia Bell LabsAs the U.S. and China ramp up their 21st-century race to land humans on the moon, its easy to overlook another aspect of lunar exploration that in many respects has become a no contest: commercially built and operated missions.As part of NASAs Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, private U.S. companies have been hurling a steady stream of innovative robotic landers at the moon in unmatched numbers. And that trend is set to continue later this month with the launch of the next CLPS mission, IM-2, from the private company Intuitive Machines. Launching from NASAs Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than February 26, IM-2 is the companys shot at redemption after its inaugural predecessor, IM-1, tilted askew during its touchdown early last year. This time IM-2s lander, Athena, will seek to stick its landing and ferry a robust array of science and technology experiments to the vicinity of Mons Mouton, a plateau near the lunar south pole.Officials from NASA and Intuitive Machines confirmed the launch details and previewed the missions science during a press briefing on February 7.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The IM-2 mission is particularly special..., as it is largely dedicated to lunar technology demonstrations that are truly foundational to creating a U.S.-led lunar infrastructure, Niki Werkheiser, director for technology maturation at NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate, said during the briefing. These demonstrations include NASAs PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1), which is capable of identifying and quantifying water [ice] and other volatile substances in lunar soil thanks to a drill that can reach up a meter into the surface. Demonstrating that we can collect these volatiles using the tech demonstrations onboard will not only help us better understand the origins of our solar system, but they will also be useful to our future astronauts for in situ resources, including drinking water, breathing air and creating rocket fuel, added Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASAs Science Mission Directorate, during the briefing.Other key technologies onboard Athena are the Micro Nova Hopper and the Lunar Surface Communication System (LSCS), developed by Intuitive Machines and Nokia Bell Labs, respectively, as part of NASAs Tipping Point technology initiative. Nicknamed Gracie after software pioneer Grace Hopper, the Micro Nova Hopper is intended to leap away from Athena sometime after the landers touchdown and to embark on a series of incremental hops toward Crater Ha 20-meter-deep, permanently shadowed crater about half a kilometer away. There it will poke around for any signs of volatiles at or under the surface.The Intuitive Machines IM-2 lander, Athena, as seen during prelaunch preparations in the companys Lunar Production and Operations Center.Intuitive Machines/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)The purpose of the [hopper] demo is to show that we can reach extreme environments with technologies other than rovers, explained Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, at the briefing. Nokias LSCS, which uses the same 4G LTE communications technology as a smartphone, will keep all of Athenas payloads online and connected as they branch out on their respective objectives. We are set up to handle the very large number of payloads that we have on this mission ... and supporting operations from around the world from different control centers for various payloads that are on the mission, Martin added.But Athena is also helping to continue previous and ongoing missions. For instance, it carries a tiny, NASA-provided aluminum device called the Laser Retroreflective Array, or LRA, which the space agency intends to use as a node in a larger lunar network for more accurately pinpointing the locations of key moon landers. And on its rocket to the moon, Athena shares a ride with various secondary payloads, chief among them NASAs Lunar Trailblazer, a moon-orbiting satellite slated to provide sophisticated high-resolution maps of where water may lurk at or beneath the moons airless surface.Besides highlighting some of the missions science at the briefing, officials also offered reassurances that Athena wouldnt succumb to the same faults that led its predecessor, the IM-1 lander, nicknamed Odysseus, to land lopsided on the moon. During its landing on February 22 of last year, Odysseus touched down about 30 degrees off-kilter, breaking a leg and falling on its sidein spite of the prelaunch glitches Intuitive Machines purported to have fixed.After the mission, we went through what we call the hot wash, Martin said at the briefing. We identified 85 things that we need to go off and look at10 of them were required to be implemented prior to our IM-2 mission[and] weve actually implemented all 85 of those.The team also made it so that an error margin up to 10 degrees from the intended trajectory will still allow for Athena to begin normal operations. If the trajectory is further off, Athenas functionality will depend on how it lands, Martin said. If we are offlets say something happened like last time, and we ended up on our sideobviously we would not be able to deploy drills, he admitted. However, there are lots of instruments on all of those systems that we would still be able to operate, just like last time, [when] we were able to get quite a bit of the data from the instruments that were on the Odysseus lander, and we were able to send that back to Earth.With Athena, were taking kind of novel technologies and turning them into institutionalized capabilitiesand thats really important, Werkheiser said at the briefing. Given the heavily technology-centered nature of the IM-2 mission, technological blips are more or less an inevitable part of the whole scheme, she said. If we learn what we need to learn [from failures], and we could only do that by doing what were doing now, then that is a success for us.