Last year, the Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander was the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in 52 years and the first-ever commercial lunar landing. Unfortunately, the historic craft experienced a hard landing due to a faulty laser rangefinder, broke at least one landing gear strut, and tipped over. Nonetheless, the mission was considered a success, as all active payloads obtained at least some data.
Side note: the passive payload was a sculpture by Jeff Koons that became the first "authorized" work of art on the moon. The crew of Apollo 15 secretly brought a sculpture with them and left it on the moon. Also, Koons sold NFTs of his sculpture, lest anyone think this was art for art's sake.
On Friday morning, Intuitive Machines gets a second chance to make the landing. The IM-2 Athena launched on February 26th and is now in lunar orbit, preparing to land on the moon. The team seems to have a sense of humor about Odysseus's laser troubles, as the "fun facts" page about the mission includes this.
Athena's laser altimeters use a 1.2-megawatt laser that fires for a few nanoseconds
and has a range of 80km. The laser enables mission controllers to know the distance
to the Moon's surface within a meter… and we triple checked it this time.
This time, the payload includes a self-propelled vehicle called "Grace" Hopper, named after the legendary computer scientist. Grace will hop into craters that are inaccessible to wheeled vehicles. Also aboard is equipment from Nokia to deploy a cellular network on the moon. NASA's Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) will drill up to three feet into the moon's surface, extract the material, and analyze the sample.
The landing will be live-streamed on NASA Plus starting at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, with the landing scheduled for 12:32 p.m.
Previously: New images of Odysseus lunar lander showing its broken leg
