Intuitive machines obtained a robot on the moon last year. The Houston company can do it again, but do you keep the spaceship in a vertical position this time?
The second lander of the company, named Athena, was launched on Wednesday evening on a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is now on a path by Aring to the moon.
The space vehicle was turned on, but then several minutes of suspense followed when it was late to check -in. In the end, the probe data arrived, accompanied by relief in controlling the mission of intuitive machines.
On March 6, the spaceship will try to land in Mons Mouton, a region about 100 miles from the southern pole of the moon. This will be closer to the south pole than each previous spatial vehicle is landed.
When the first Lander of intuitive machines, Odysseus, put on the moon in February last year, managed to communicate with the earth even if he had reversed on his side. He was the first Lander commercially operated to reach the surface of the moon and the first American vehicle to gently land on the moon from Apollo 17 in 1972.
The main payload on Athena is a drill for NASA as part of her commercial lunar payload service program. Paying a commercial company as intuitive machines to bring something to the moon is cheaper for NASA than designing and building its space vehicle.
The drill is designed to dig about three feet under the surface, pulling on a lunar ground of about four inches at a time and letting it fall on a stack on the surface. A tool known as a mass spectrometer, therefore it will smell the perforated material for compounds such as frozen water that easily transform into gas.
The Lander Athena also transports three Rovers Roboti and a small steering wheel “hopper” that will be deployed after landing.
The largest rover, known as the platform of independent mobile prospecting, or MAPP, is part of a test financed by the NASA of the first mobile network on the moon. Nokia won funding from the space agency to test technology, but then she needed a way to move at least one antenna at a certain distance from the Lander. So Nokia hired a company called Outpost Lunar to build the Rover, which has the size of a small dog.
Lunar Outpost has sold space on MAPP to other customers. One, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a small rover called Astroant, which crawls on the upper flat surface of MAPP.
Athena will also distribute a rover called Yooki, built by a Japanese company, Dymon, which is a little larger than a mini mini computer.
Intuitive machines built the hopper as part of another NASA contract. The small rocket -powered profession could offer new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to the way in which Nasa’s ingenuity helicopter on Mars has provided a different way to explore the areas that cannot be easily reached on the ground.
On the moon Airless, helicopters cannot fly, but the engines will allow the hopper to fly long distances. It will also bring one of the antennas of the Nokia mobile phone. The plan is to fly into one of the permanently shaded craters of the moon.
Why did the last intuitive Lander overturned the Lander?
The Odysseus Lander should have used an altimeter laser to help him guide him on the moon’s surface. But due to supervision during launch preparations, a safety switch for the device has never been disabled, making that tool useless. The engineers of intuitive machines quickly rewritten their landing software to use similar measurements from an experimental NASA tool on the space vehicle. But they lost the update of a key parameter in the computer code and the landing software has ignored the data.
The spaceship is thus landed with its exact altitude, guessing only its distance above the surface based on the horizontal speed calculated by the images of the camera and by the measurements of the accelerations in the speed of the space vehicle. The hypotheses were close enough not to crash, even if it still moved horizontally. The landing broke and the space vehicle aimed.
The Lander Athena is almost identical to Odysseo-Sognuno is what the company calls its Nova-CE design, the officials of the intuitive machines have declared that they have tested the laser several times.
What other space vehicles travel with Athena?
Three other separate space vehicles are riding on the Falcon 9 rocket. They are essentially exploiting the extra payload space in the rocket for a cheaper ride in space.
One, Lunar Trailblazer, is a NASA mission at a lost-cost-cost cost $ 100 million-proposed to measure the distribution of water on the moon from the orbit.
While Athena will make a quick journey on the moon, Lunar Trailblazer will take a more pleasant and efficient path in terms of fuel. If the launch is checked on Wednesday, it will take just over four months to reach the moon. (If the launch occurs on a different day, the trajectory changes and the journey could pass up to seven months.)
A second spatial vehicle, Odin, is a spatial vehicle of microwave -size built by the Astroforge of California company. He will head to an asteroid near the earth to examine if it could be full of precious metals that could be extracted in the future.
A third vehicle, Chimera Geo 1, is a San Francisco Epic Aerospace Space vehicle designed to put small satellites in distant orbits.
An eclipse?!
The surface mission should last for less than a lunar day, or about 10 days of earth, until the sun sets. Without solar energy, the batteries of the space vehicle run out.
But in the middle of the lunar day, on March 14 around 2 am, the darkness will fall for a few minutes – an eclipse when the earth passes between the sun and the moon.
The solar energy lander will have to draw energy from its batteries during the eclipse but should survive.
What else is looking at the moon soon?
Athena is the third commercial lander launched towards the moon this year, even if it could be the second to arrive.
On January 15, a Falcon 9 rocket launched by transporting the other two Landers: Blue Ghost of Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and resilience by Japan.
Blue Ghost, like Athena, is part of the NASA CLPS program, and it is scheduled that it will land on March 2, in front of Athena. It is directed towards the Cavalla crisis, a basin in the north -east quadrant of the nearby side of the moon.
Resilience, also known as the Lader of Hakuto-R Mission 2, is taking an indirect path and should arrive at the Moon in May. Its landing site is located near the Centro di Mare Frigoris, or in the cold sea, in the northern hemisphere of the moon. This will be the second attempt to live the Lunar landing of ISPA. His first mission, in 2023, crashed.