Coming Down: CLPS Flight | Intuitive Machines IM-2
On Feb 27th, 2025, the latest mission that is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative has launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. For this mission, going up is important, but coming down even more so. Because Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 is going to land on the moon – hopefully on March 6th, 2025.
Let’s have a look at what IM-2 brings to the moon
Update:
Intuitive Machines has stated that “IM-2 mission lunar lander, Athena, landed 250 meters from its intended landing site” and has tipped over. Lying on its side, the solar panels could not deploy and the batteries quickly depleted. The mission was declared concluded.
Athena
Athena is sort of the mothership that will bring many exciting payloads safely to the lunar surface. It is IM’s second Nova-C class lander. The machine provides the ride to the lunar surface and also communication services for the different missions. It stands at 4.73 m (15.3 ft) tall, which means it is roughly the height of a shorter adult giraffe.
Now let’s see what it carries to the moon. There are NASA payloads and commercial payloads.
NASA Payloads
The first is NASA’s POLAR RESOURCES ICE MINING EXPERIMENT 1 (PRIME-1) drill suite, which consists of – you guessed it – a drill and a mass spectrometer.
TRIDENT (The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain) will attempt to drill up to 1 meter deep and extract lunar soil – called regolith – and deposit it on the surface for analysis. It will also measure soil temperature at depth, which will help to validate existing lunar thermal models.
The drill suite’s Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) will identify light volatiles to either measure the lunar exosphere or the spacecraft outgassing and contamination. That can help to determine the composition and concentration of potentially accessible resources.
So the suite is a demonstrator for tech that can help search for and identify interesting resources on the moon towards mining them.
Commercial Payloads
NOKIA LUNAR SURFACE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
We should start by mentioning Nokia’s cellular network because it will be providing the underlying connectivity between the Nova-C lander, two mission vehicles and the sensors they carry.
It is also a Nokia Bell Labs demonstrator, that wants to show that space-hardened cellular technologies based on some of the same commercial-off-the-shelf components used in 4G/LTE networks across the globe can work for such a mission. It intends to offer dependable, high-capacity and efficient connectivity and communication for tasks such as voice, video, data communication, telemetry and biometric data for both crewed and uncrewed lunar and planetary missions.
YAOKI ROVER
Dymon Co. Ltd. Yaoki Rover is a small, lightweight rover with a special way to go around: It is designed to be versatile and resilient, enabling it to be dropped in any orientation without a mechanism. The best way to understand how is to have a look at the video:
As for the rover: it is essentially a self-driving camera that will examine and demonstrate mobility and adaptability on the lunar surface close to the lander and hopefully take some cool images.
MAPP
Lunar Outpost’s MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) is an autonomous rover with a navigation system that can operate without GPS, using visual cues and sensors to navigate and avoid hazards. It is furthermore built in a way that should give access to previously unreachable regions.
MICRO NOVA HOPPER
The little craft called *Grace* is not called HOPPER because it hops. But that is precisely what it will do. Following the advice of why drive if you can fly, it will – if all goes well – perform several hops of 20–100 m in altitude. The penultimate hop is expected to be into a small permanently shadowed crater approximately one quarter of a mile from the landing site. This would be the first time that a permanently shadowed crater, is being explored.
At about 98 cm in height and 39 kg weight, it will carry enough fuel for a range of up to 25 km of autonomously going up, going sideways, and going down.
The IM-2 Micro Nova Hopper is named for Grace Hopper, the pioneer in mathematics and programming who worked on some of the earliest computers, and developed the first compiler and COBOL, a language still used today.
The Hopper will also carry two more instruments to gather relevant data:
LRAD – the Lunar Radiometer – built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and FU Berlin will study surface temperatures at the Moon’s South Pole, particularly in permanently shadowed regions where water ice may be stable.
PULI LUNAR WATER SNOOPER (PLWS) by Puli Space Technologies Ltd. of Hungary is a tiny spectrometer weighing just 400 grams. It will collect water ice indicator data from the Moon’s South Pole region, conducting the first-ever direct surface measurements from a permanently shadowed crater, supporting critical in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) efforts for future lunar exploration.
Landing Site and Duration
Athena is targeting the “Mons Mouton” region of the Moon, approximately only 100 miles from the Moon’s South Pole.
Mons Mouton is named after the mathematician Melba Mouton, one of the first “human computers” who played a key role in the early field of spacecraft trajectory and geodynamics.
The missions will have only about 10 days to complete their objectives before the sun sets on the lunar South Pole, rendering Athena inoperable as extreme temperatures take hold.
