A private company launched another lunar lander on Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon’s south pole this time with a drone that would hop into a jet-black crater that never sees the sun.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It is taking a fast track to the moon — with a landing on Thursday next week — while hoping to avoid the fate of its predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown.
Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon’s surface all at once. Last month, US and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward Earth’s sidekick.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Texas-based Firefly Aerospace should get there first this weekend after a big head start.
The two US landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s an amazing time. There’s so much energy,” NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said a few hours ahead of the launch.
This is not Intuitive Machines’ first lunar rodeo. Last year, the Texas company made the first US 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 the issue and dozens of others. A sideways landing like last time would prevent the drone and a pair of rovers from moving out. NASA’s drill also needs an upright landing to pierce beneath the lunar surface to gather soil samples for analysis.
“Certainly, we will be better this time than we were last time, but you never know what could happen,” senior vice president of space systems Trent Martin said.
It is an extraordinarily elite club. Only five countries have pulled off a lunar landing over the decades: Russia, the US, China, India and Japan. The moon is littered with wreckage from many past failures.
The 4.7m Athena would target a landing 160km from the lunar south pole. Just 400m away is a permanently shadowed crater — the ultimate destination for the drone named Grace.
Named after the late computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, the 1m drone would 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 would hop into the nearby pitch-black crater, an estimated 20m deep.
Science instruments from Hungary and Germany would take measurements at the bottom while hunting for frozen water.
It would 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 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 US$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.
They included NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which would fly separately to the moon over the next several months before entering lunar orbit to map the distribution of water below.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS