A newly launched lunar lander just captured some stunning shots of its home planet.
Athena, the second moon lander from Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday evening (Feb. 26).
Shortly after deploying into the final frontier, Athena snapped a few selfies with Earth in the background, including one that shows the Falcon 9‘s upper stage drifting in the void beneath the lander. (Bright specks visible near the rocket stage may be some of the other payloads that launched with Athena, such as NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter and Odin, a probe built by the asteroid-mining company Astroforge.)
As those photos suggest, all is going well so far with Athena’s mission, which is called IM-2.
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“Athena established a stable attitude, solar charging and radio communications contact with the Company’s mission operations center in Houston after liftoff on February 26,” Intuitive Machines wrote in an update this morning (Feb. 27).
“The lander is in excellent health and preparing for a series of planned main engine firings to refine her trajectory ahead of lunar orbit insertion, which is planned for March 3. Intuitive Machines expects a lunar landing opportunity on March 6.”
IM-2 is flying via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science and technology instruments on private moon landers. The goal is to gather a wealth of cost-efficient lunar data ahead of the arrival of Artemis astronauts a few years from now.
Athena’s chief payload is PRIME-1 (“Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1”), which consists of a deep-digging drill and a mass spectrometer. Together, this gear will help scientists assess the abundance and accessibility of water ice at Athena’s landing site near the lunar south pole.
Athena is also carrying Grace, a novel hopping spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines that will explore a crater near the landing site, and MAPP, a small rover from the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. These three robots will stay in touch thanks to another IM-2 payload, Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System, which will establish the first-ever 4G/LTE network on the moon.
Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander, Odysseus, touched down successfully on the moon in February 2024, becoming the first private craft ever to do so. But Athena won’t be the second to pull off the feat, if all goes according to plan.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander is gearing up for its own touchdown attempt, which will take place in the early hours of March 2. Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 along with Resilience, a lunar lander built by Tokyo-based company ispace, which will try try to touch down in late May or early June.
