The photographer lifted from the PAD 39A on February 26, 2025 from the Kennedy Passe Centre in Canaveral, Florida, to record the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with an intuitive machine. Image source: AP
A private company launched another Lunar Lander on Wednesday (February 26, 2025) with the aim of this time to approach the Moon’s South Pole through a drone that will jump into a jet-type black crater that has never seen the sun.
The lander of the intuitive machine is named Athena, and it catches an elevator with SpaceX at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It landed on March 6 to the moon’s fast orbit while hoping to avoid the fate of its predecessor, who tilted on the touchdown.
Never have so many spacecraft tilted the moon’s surface at once. Last month, the U.S. and Japanese companies shared a rocket and launched landers to their partners on Earth. Texas-based Firefly Aerospace should be there this weekend after the big start.
The two U.S. landers are providing NASA with tens of millions of dollars in experiments as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s been a great time,” Nicky Fox, head of science missions at NASA, told NASA. Associated Press A few hours in advance.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a second Lunar Lander with an intuitive machine was lifted from a PAD 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on February 26, 2025. Image source: AP
This is not the first lunar rodeo of the intuitive machine. Last year, the Texas-based company made a U.S. touchdown on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. However, the instrument at a distance did not work properly, the lander was too hard, and broke its leg and tilted one side.
The intuitive machine says it has solved this problem and dozens of problems. A side landing like the last time would stop the drone and a pair of wanderers from moving out. NASA’s drill bits also need to land upright to pierce the moon’s surface to collect soil samples for analysis.
“Of course, we’ll be better this time than last time. But you never know what will happen,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems.
In the past few decades, only five countries have landed on the moon: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan. The moon was thrown by many wreckages of past failures.
Athena, 15 feet (4.7 meters) will aim for a landing of 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the Moon’s South Pole. Only a quarter mile (400 meters) away is a permanently sheltered crater, the ultimate destination for a drone called Grace.
The 3-foot (1 meter) drone, named after Grace Hopper, a pioneer in late computer programming, will use a hydrogen-type straight-sports to fly, cameras and lasers for navigation.
If these tours are good, it will jump into the nearby pitch-black crater, estimated to be 65 feet (20 meters) deep. Scientific instruments from Hungary and Germany will take measurements at the bottom while hunting frozen water.
This will be the first to peek up close at one of the numerous shadowed craters in the Arctic and Antarctic. Scientists suspect that these craters are filled with large amounts of ice. If so, future explorers can turn this ice into water to breathe, or even rocket fuel.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a second Lunar Lander with an intuitive machine was lifted from a PAD 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on February 26, 2025. Image source: AP
NASA paid $62 million to intuitive machines to bring its drill bits and other experiments to the moon. The company in turn sold the space on the logger to other companies. It also turned on the Falcon Rockets to share the ride.
TAGALONGS includes NASA’s Lunar Trail Blazer satellite, which will fly to the moon alone in the coming months and then enter the moon’s orbit to map the distribution of water below. Similarly, the ride is a private spacecraft that will chase the asteroid to Flyby, the predecessor of asteroid mining.
publishing – February 27, 2025 at 08:07 am IST
