Commercial moon missions with NASA connections are all the rage right now. Firefly Aerospace stuck the lunar landing of its Blue Ghost mission on March 2. Now, Intuitive Machines will try for a similar success with its IM-2 mission Thursday. It should be a thrilling ride, and you can follow along live.
What is IM-2?
Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander is nicknamed Athena. It carries a suite of science instruments and robots – including a hopping drone, multiple small rovers and a NASA drill designed to burrow three feet under the surface. The lander’s cargo includes both NASA and commercial payloads.
The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, an effort by the space agency to use private companies to send landers and rovers to the moon. NASA’s grander goals through its Artemis moon program are to return astronauts to the lunar surface and establish a long-term human presence there. IM-2 is in service of that vision.
“The lander is carrying NASA technology that will measure the potential presence of resources from lunar soil that could be extracted and used by future explorers to produce fuel or breathable oxygen,” the space agency said in an update on March 4.
When is the IM-2 moon landing?
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The IM-2 mission sent back some views of Earth after launch in February.
Athena’s travels kicked off on Feb. 26 with a launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. Intuitive Machines is targeting the mission’s landing for 9:32 a.m. PT on Thursday, March 6. The landing site is near the moon’s south pole, a prime NASA target region for future human exploration.
The timing was partly dictated by the availability of sunlight on the moon’s surface. The Athena lander uses solar power. Intuitive Machines expects the lander to operate for about 10 days.
How to watch the IM-2 landing
NASA’s live landing coverage takes place on its free NASA Plus streaming service starting at 8:30 a.m. PT, about an hour before touchdown. NASA Plus is available through the website or through the NASA app. The broadcast will also be on YouTube.
A post-landing news conference is scheduled for 1 p.m. PT.
MIT’s To the Moon to Stay
There’s another way to engage with the landing and mission festivities. Comcast’s Xfinity service and MIT Media Lab have teamed up for real-time coverage. MIT is involved with the IM-2 mission’s Lunar Outpost Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform rover. MAPP is designed to navigate rugged terrain using sensors and visual cues.
MIT’s To the Moon to Stay program features educational resources and will deliver a livestream of the landing along with other key events from the mission. Keep an eye out for a later live feed involving the MAPP rover along with photos and videos from the lunar surface.
Xfinity X1 customers can access the mission resources and livestreams by saying “to the moon” to their voice remotes.
Why IM-2 is important
Crewed space missions tend to attract a lot of attention. IM-2 may not have any humans on board, but it’s worth following along for the fascinating science. Planetary scientist Phil Metzger, research professor at the University of Central Florida, highlights the mission’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1.
PRIME-1 aims to measure the ice in the moon’s soil, and that’s a big deal.
“That ice contains a record of the history of the inner solar system and may help us understand how water and carbon were delivered to the Earth-Moon system billions of years ago, turning the Earth into a habitable planet,” Metzger tells CNET. “This is crucial for understanding how many other planets might be capable of supporting life in the galaxy, so it helps answer the question, ‘Are we alone in the cosmos?'” You can’t get more profound than that.
NASA hopes PRIME-1 will help researchers understand water availability. Water is heavy and expensive to transport through space, so future human expeditions will want to make use of what’s already on the moon.
Landing on the moon is hard
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Athena sent back a lunar selfie while in orbit around the moon.
Many missions have tried and failed to land successfully on the moon. Russia’s Luna-25 mission crashed into the moon in 2023. Israel’s Beresheet mission and India’s Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander both crashed in 2019. “Lunar landers are challenging, not just because the lunar environment is so harsh and exotic, but because we fly so few of them,” Metzger says, noting failures are a part of the process of learning how to make moon landings reliable.
It’s much harder to touch down on the moon than on Earth. “The moon has a large enough gravity to make it challenging to land softly, but no atmosphere to help slow down a lander,” says Josh Colwell, associate dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida. “The surface is very rough at all spatial scales, so the tipping over of a lander is a real risk.”
It’s not just about having good landing hardware. The software and systems on board needs to analyze the surface to help guide the lander to a safe spot.
Lunar landings are thrilling, in part because of the dangers the machines have to navigate for a safe touchdown.
You might be wondering what happened to the IM-1 mission. Intuitive Machines delivered its Odysseus lander to the moon in 2024, but not everything went right. The lander made it to the surface, but ended up sideways, putting a damper on its science work. The company is rooting for a gentle, upright landing for IM-2.
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