Intuitive Machines preps IM-2 mission for Moon launch this week

Early next month, a robotic lander will arrive at the Moon’s south pole bearing an eclectic suite of payloads to search for subsurface water ice. Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 is targeting a touchdown at 84.6° south latitude, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the pole. It will deploy an ice-mining drill and mass spectrometer, a miniaturized rover, and a unique “hopper” craft to explore the interior of a permanently shadowed crater for the first time.

The six-legged Nova-C lander will ride atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center during a four-day launch window that opens on Wednesday, Feb. 26. And like earlier missions from this hallowed launch complex — including Apollo 8 (the first crew-carrying Moon voyage) and Apollo 11 (humanity’s first crewed lunar landing) — IM-2 will carve its own niche and add its own raft of historic firsts.

An on-time launch and lunar transit will position IM-2 for a March 6 landing at a ridge near the 13-mile-wide (21 km) diameter Shackleton crater. While the towering peaks around its rim bask in near-continual sunlight, its interior is perpetually shadowed and may harbor water-ice. Shackleton was initially picked in 2022 as a potential landing site for Artemis 3, the first human lunar landing since Apollo. Although it is no longer on the list for landing sites, the ridge is still near other possible deployment areas.

Commercial partner

Texas-based Intuitive Machines is one of 14 industrial partners selected by NASA for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) — a $2.6 billion initiative unveiled in May 2018 to encourage industry to build robotic landers and fly payloads to the Moon. Intuitive Machines was chosen as a CLPS partner in November 2018 and has since won four NASA contracts for a quartet of missions through 2027.

The firm’s in-house-built Nova-C lander stands 14.1 feet (4.3 meters) tall and 5.2 feet (1.6 m) wide across its hexagonal frame — the size of a small car. It can carry up to 280 pounds (130 kilograms) of payloads to the lunar surface. Its 3D-printed VR-900 motor was the first methane/oxygen-fueled engine ever fired in deep space when it was lit on the IM-1 mission in February 2024.

Three solar panels — one on the lander’s top deck, plus two body-mounted arrays — afford 200 watts of electricity for a surface lifespan of a full lunar day, or about two weeks on Earth. Battery limitations mean Nova-C cannot survive the frigid two-week lunar night, when temperatures fall from daytime highs of 250 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius)  to lows of –208 F (–130 C).

For IM-2, Intuitive Machines has given its Nova-C lander the name Athena, honoring the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. (The IM-2 mission team has affectionately shortened the name to Addy.)

Middling success

Intuitive Machines’ first mission last year delivered mixed results. IM-1, carrying 10 science and technology payloads for NASA, academia and industry, became the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Named Odysseus after the Greek hero of the Trojan War, IM-1 made the first ever lunar landing by a commercial vehicle and the closest to the south pole, at 80.13° south latitude.

However, a safety switch on Odysseus’ primary laser rangefinder was not activated before launch. A critical part of IM-1’s navigation toolkit, it facilitated accurate altitude and velocity data during descent to the Moon. Ground teams enacted several in-flight workarounds to resolve the problem — but Odysseus landed faster than expected, skidding along the surface, breaking one of its legs and toppling over at an awkward 30° angle.

RELATED: Odysseus traveled to the Moon, broke its leg, and still pinged Earth to tell the story

Some scientific data was returned but Odysseus eventually lost power and shut down at lunar nightfall. A post-mission review identified 85 technical issues, all of which the company thinks it has resolved. But success on IM-2 is not guaranteed. “Spaceflight is hard — landing on the Moon is extremely difficult,” Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines’ senior vice president for space systems, told reporters at a media teleconference earlier this month. “You never know what could happen.”

By the time IM-1 flew, IM-2 was nearing completion. The mission’s origins date to October 2020, when NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $47 million contract to deliver its 88-pound (40 kg) Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) to the lunar south pole, where permanently shadowed craters could hold large quantities of water ice — a key resource in enabling in humanity’s future exploration of the Moon.

An underground search

PRIME-1’s two instruments — the Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT), built by Honeybee Robotics, and NASA’s Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) — will drill into the surface, seeking water ice and measuring liberated volatiles. A rotary-percussive drill with carbide teeth harder than steel, TRIDENT will spin and hammer its way as deep as 3 feet (1 m) into the regolith.

“We’re going to go down in roughly 10 centimeter (3.9 inches) “bites” … You’re capturing the regolith on the flutes of the drill,” explained Jacqueline Quinn, PRIME-1’s principal investigator  and an environmental engineer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “Then you’re going to bring that drill back up to the surface … and during that process of raising the drill, it passively pushes past a brush and the brushing mechanism basically flings the regolith onto the surface.”

The result will be a series of conical piles of excavated lunar material from increasingly greater depths which MSolo will analyze for the presence of volatiles. “Each time we deposit the 10 cm (3.9 inches) on the surface, we’re getting a lot of key geotechnical data and we’re also getting any volatiles data from the process of sublimation of gases,” added Quinn. 

As it drills, PRIME-1 will also furnish insights into the forces needed to excavate lunar material, as well as surface temperatures, energy requirements and the effectiveness, reliability and behavior of power tools on the Moon. It was built as a precursor for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), a mission to search for water-ice at the lunar south pole but cancelled last summer — in a development that shocked scientists — due to cost and schedule overruns.

Delivering payloads

In addition to the mission’s main payload of PRIME-1, IM-2 is carrying an array of other scientific experiments.

Lunar Outpost’s 22-pound (10 kg) Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) is a tiny rover that will venture 1 mile (1.6 km) over the surface, communicating directly with Athena and Earth via a high-bandwidth 4G/LTE cellular network provided by Nokia. MAPP will gather samples for NASA under a contract worth just $1 — a symbolic incentive for emerging commercial space industries to access lunar resources.

Moving at a top speed of 0.2 mph (0.32 km/hr), MAPP and its hosted payloads will map the local terrain, capturing stereo imagery and thermal data and analyzing samples of regolith in a special bin attached to its wheels.

RELATED: The IM-2 Moon mission will carry a blend of science and art

Also aboard IM-2 is Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova Hopper, which will separate from Athena after landing and serve as a standalone drone, exploring difficult-to-reach areas using tiny hydrazine thrusters to propel itself across short distances. Named Grace after U.S. Navy rear-admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper (1906–1992), it will perform five short flights — or “hops” — including one into a permanently shadowed region inside a crater — a first for any spacecraft.

The hopper can carry payloads up to 2 pounds (0.9 kg) across distances of 1.5 miles (2.4 km) for high-resolution surveys of the Moon. Like MAPP, it will transmit data and photographs via the Nokia cellular network to Athena.

Its first hop will reach a height of 65 feet (20 m) with two additional hops aiming to reach 165 feet (50 m) then 330 feet (100 m). On its fourth and fifth hops, it will leap in and out of a permanently shadowed region inside a 65 feet-deep (20 m) crater. Assuming IM-2 lands on target, the crater — known only as Crater H — should be 1,300 to 1,650 feet (400 to 500 m) from the landing site. Temperatures inside the crater could dip as low as –370 F (–223 C).

“Once in the crater, if we have communication, we’ll continue to communicate with Gracie,” said Martin, referring to the craft by its nickname. “We believe, based on our discussions with Nokia, that we might actually still have communications down within that crater.”

If not, after 45 minutes, Grace will hop back out of the crater using its own power. Drone-like devices like IM-2’s hopper are expected to prove beneficial for future missions where deep, steep locations are rendered inaccessible to humans or rovers. 

Other IM-2 payloads include Lunar Trailblazer, a NASA probe that will map the distribution of water-ice across the Moon; Japan’s 1.1-pound (0.5 kg) Yaoki mini-rover; and the first flight of Spaceflight, Inc.’s Sherpa EScape (Sherpa-ES) space tug to the Moon. 

After launching IM-2 later this month, Intuitive Machines will continue pushing ahead with other missions. In late 2025, IM-3 will land at the equatorial Reiner Gamma site to investigate the mysterious surface phenomenon known as lunar swirls. And in 2027, IM-4 will deliver a European surface drill and other payloads to the Moon’s south pole.