How to watch the launch of the second moon landing mission of the intuitive machine

Last year, intuitive machines landed the robot on the moon. Houston can do it again, but this time keeping the spacecraft upright?

When the moon landed on last February, the spacecraft was on the moon last February, even though it fell on its side. This is the first commercially operated land station to reach the surface of the moon and the first American vehicle to land gently on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The company's second lander, called Athena, is now on the launch pad. Here is what you need to know about Wednesday's flights.

When will it be released and how should I watch it?

Athena and three other spacecraft will be launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The release time is scheduled to be held on February 26 at 7:16 PM ET. The chances of favorable weather are more than 95%, SpaceX said it said less than an hour before the flight refueling time.

In the event of weather or technical issues, backup opportunities will be provided in the four-day release window. After that, the task must be delayed by one month.

NASA will start providing reports on the release about 45 minutes before the launch. You can watch it in the agent's YouTube channel or in the video player embedded above.

Where is Athena going?

If released on Wednesday, the Intuitive Machine Spacecraft will attempt to land on March 6 at Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the Moon's South Pole. This will be closer to the South Pole than any previous lunar lander.

What does Athena carry?

The main payload is NASA's drill as part of its commercial lunar payload service program. Paying for commercial companies like Intuitive Machines is cheaper to bring things to the moon than having NASA designs and builds their own spacecraft.

The drill bit is designed to dig soil about three feet below the ground. It will extract about four inches of lunar soil at a time. An instrument called a mass spectrometer will then sniff around the drilled material, such as frozen water, which can easily be converted into gas.

Athena Lander also carries three robotic vagabonds and a small flying “hopper” that will be deployed after landing.

The largest rovers, called the Mobile Autonomous Exploration Platform (MAPP), is part of the first mobile network on the moon funded by NASA. Nokia won financing from the space agency to test the technology, but then needed a way to move at least one antenna to a certain distance from the Randman. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outpost to build the rovers, about the size of a puppy.

Lunar Ortost sold space to other customers on MAPP. One, Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built a small rover called Astroant that will crawl on the flat surface of the Mapp.

Athena will also deploy a Wanderer called Yaoki, built by Japanese company Dymon, a little bigger than a Mac Mini computer.

The intuitive machine sets the hopper as part of another NASA contract. Small rocket-powered aircraft can provide new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, providing a different way to explore areas that are not easy to reach the ground.

On the empty moon, helicopters cannot fly, but the thrusters will make the hopper fly for a long distance. It will also carry one of the Nokia phone antennas. The plan is to fly into one of the craters that are permanently shaded by the moon.

eclipse?

The ostensible mission plan lasts less than one lunar day, or about 10 Earth days, until the sun sets. Without solar energy, the spacecraft's batteries will run out of power.

But in the middle of the Lunar Day, at 2 a.m. on March 14, the darkness will fall for a few minutes – as the earth passes between the sun and the moon, a solar eclipse will erode.

A solar-powered lander will have to draw power from the battery during an eclipse, but should survive.

Why did the last lander of the intuitive machine fall?

The Odysseus lander should use a laser altimeter to help guide it to the moon's surface. But the tool is useless because of supervision during launch preparation, the safety switch of the device is never disabled. The engineer of the intuitive machine rushed to rewrite its landing software to make similar measurements using the NASA instruments on the spacecraft. But they missed an update of a key parameter in the computer code, and the landing software ignored the data.

Therefore, the spacecraft falls at its exact height and its distance can only be guessed based on the horizontal velocity calculated from the camera image and the measurements of acceleration in the spacecraft speed. Although it is still moving horizontally, guesses are close enough to not crash. The landing gear ruptured and the spacecraft tilted.

Athena Lander is almost the same as Odysseus – everyone calls it Nova-C design – Intuitive Machine Officials say they have tested the laser multiple times.

Which other spacecraft travel with Athena?

Three other independent spacecraft rode on the Falcon 9 rocket. They essentially take advantage of the additional payload space in the rocket to ride in cheaper space.

One is the Lunar Trail Blazer, a lost NASA mission (about $100 million) designed to measure the distribution of moisture on the orbit.

While Athena will be on a quick week of lunar trips, Lunar Trailblazer will take a more laid-back, fuel-efficient road. If launched on Wednesday, it will take more than four months to reach the moon. (If the launch occurs on a different day, the trajectory changes and the journey can be as long as seven months.)

The second spacecraft, Odin, is a microwave-sized spacecraft built by Astroforge, California. It will head to the near-Earth asteroid to check whether it may be filled with valuable metals that can be mined in the future.

The third car, the Chimera Geo 1, is an epic aerospace vehicle in San Francisco designed to put small satellites into distant orbits.

What else will land on the moon soon?

Athena is the third commercial RAND to the moon this year, although it may be the second arrival.

On January 15, a Falcon 9 rocket launched two other landers – Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace in Austin, Texas, and the resilience of Japan's Ispace.

Like Athena, Blue Ghost is part of NASA's CLPS program, which is scheduled to land on March 2. It heads towards Mare Crisium in a basin in the northeastern quadrant near the moon.

Resilience, also known as Hakuto-r Mission 2 Lander, is taking an indirect route and is expected to reach the moon in May. Its landing site is near the center of Mare Frigoris or the coldest in the northern hemisphere of the Moon. This will be Ispace's second lunar landing attempt. It crashed on its first mission in 2023.