Just over a half hour ago, as I sit to start writing, Mrs. Graybeard and I stepped outside to watch the night's launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 from complex 39A on the Kennedy Space Center. Among a variety of rideshare payloads, the highlight of the mission was Intuitive Machines IM-2 Lunar Lander, also named Athena.
With Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander already in orbit around the moon, and ispace's Resilience lander finalizing its lunar orbit, this marks the third lander currently on the way to the moon. Blue Ghost is currently planned to land on the moon Sunday, March 2, NET 2:34 AM. CST. (NET = No Earlier Than). YouTube video coverage here is expected to go live March 2nd at 1:20 AM CST. Next will be tonight's launch, Intuitive Machine's Athena lander. Athena is on a much faster trajectory than the Blue Ghost and Resilience landers, and will reach the moon on March 6th landing "around lunchtime". ispace's Resilience simply says, "May."
There's another satellite on tonight's ridesharing mission, NASA’s JPL Lunar Trailblazer satellite, on a similar trajectory as Athena.
Lunar Trailblazer is expected to begin orbiting the Moon, mapping the quantity and location of water ice on the surface, while Athena descends to its landing site in the Mons Mouton region ~100 miles from the lunar South Pole.
During its 10 day mission closer to the south pole than any lunar lander ever, Athena will release two more payloads focused on the search for water: PRIME-1 and PLWS.
PRIME-1: NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment contains two instruments:
- A drill from Honeybee Robotics (The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain, or TRIDENT)
- A mass spectrometer from NASA (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations, or MSolo).
The meter-long drill will bore into the lunar surface in 10-cm increments, depositing the soil on the surface for MSolo to analyze. MSolo will also examine the gasses emitted during the drilling process to better understand the lunar subsurface and detect possible contamination from the Nova-C lander.
PLWS: The Puli Lunar Water Snooper from Hungary-based Puli Space Technologies is a 400-g dowsing instrument attached to Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper that will attempt to identify and measure the concentration of water in lunar soil—both near the landing site and in a permanently shaded crater nearby.
ispace's Resilience lander is bringing water electrolyzing equipment to demonstrate the production of oxygen and hydrogen on the Moon for the first time. Of course, electrolysis equipment isn't going to do much good if Resilience doesn't have any water to electrolyze.
It's important to note that while previous sensing missions reported the presence of water, NASA’s SOFIA and China's Chang’e-5 mission say the water is "unevenly distributed" and finding it will be a challenge.
Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Athena lander. Image: Intuitive Machines
Must be wonderful , step out on your porch and see these beautiful rockets rising to the heavens.
ReplyDeleteRead about one of these landers has two really funny autonomous probes, which are rockets combined with pogo sticks, they gently launch way below escape velocity, come back down and repeat the sequence, that way a lot of ground gets covered, detecting water ice. Pretty ingenious little guys be-bopping across the moonscape, whoever came up with the idea should get a prize for thinking outside the box.
Last thing back when we where kids up to and during during Apollo, was the thought. of water ice on the moon, to us it was like Buzz Aldrin said, "magnificent desolation".
Did you notice the common theme throughout this article?
ReplyDeleteAll are happening due to one company. SpaceX. Without Falcon 9, none of this would have happened. Just lowering launch costs itself has had a positive effect by reducing overall mission costs. But the kicker is the launch cadence. No more fighting over a few available launches a year.
Gone are the days of sniping at a space issue, one launch at a time, with only 10-30 launches a year. Now we're in the beltfed machine gun launch phase. Pretty soon we'll be in the rapid-fire cannister cannon phase, once Starship comes on line.