CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon’s south pole this time with a drone that will hop into a black crater where the sun never shines.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It’s taking a fast track to the moon, with a landing on March 6. The company hopes to avoid the fate of Athena’s predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown.
Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon’s surface all at once. Last month, U.S. and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward the moon. The lander from the U.S. company, Firefly Aerospace of Texas, should get there first this weekend.
The two U.S. landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars’ worth of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s an amazing time. There’s so much energy,” NASA science mission chief Nicky Fox told The Associated Press a few hours ahead of the launch.
Last year, Texas-based Intuitive Machines made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. But an instrument that gauges distance did not work, and the lander came down too hard and broke a leg, tipping onto its side.
Intuitive Machines said it has fixed that issue and dozens of others. A sideways landing like last time would prevent a drone and a pair of rovers from moving out. A NASA drill that’s aboard also needs an upright landing to be able to pierce the lunar surface and gather soil samples for analysis.
“Certainly, we will be better this time than we were last time. But you never know what could happen,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems.
It’s an extraordinarily elite club. Only five countries have pulled off a lunar landing over the decades: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. The moon is littered with wreckage from many past failures.
The 4.7-meter (15-foot) Athena will target a landing 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the lunar south pole. Just 400 meters (a quarter mile) away is a permanently shadowed crater — the ultimate destination for the drone named Grace.
Named after the late computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, the 1-meter (3-foot) drone will make three increasingly higher and longer test hops across the lunar surface using hydrazine-fueled thrusters for flight and cameras and lasers for navigation.
If those excursions go well, it will hop into the nearby pitch-black crater, an estimated 20 meters (65 feet) deep. Science instruments from Hungary and Germany will take measurements at the bottom while hunting for frozen water.
It will be the first up-close peek inside one of the many shadowed craters dotting both the north and south poles. Scientists suspect these craters are packed with tons of ice. If so, this ice could be transformed by future explorers into water to drink, air to breathe and even rocket fuel.
NASA is paying $62 million to Intuitive Machines to get its drill and other experiments to the moon. The company, in turn, sold space on the lander to others. It also opened up the Falcon rocket to ride-sharing.
Tagalongs included NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which will fly separately to the moon over the next several months before entering lunar orbit to map the distribution of water below. Also catching a ride was a private spacecraft that will chase after an asteroid for a flyby, a precursor to asteroid mining.
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