Intuitive Machines’ Athena moon lander is giving us some fantastic perspectives from lunar orbit forward of its March 6 landing strive.Athena’s project, referred to as IM-2, is Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ 2nd jaunt to the moon. It is a part of NASA’s Business Lunar Payload Products and services (CLPS) program, which contracts non-public firms to ship company science and generation payloads to the lunar floor. Athena introduced on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s House Coast on Feb. 26 and entered lunar orbit this week after a brief few days in transit.Now that the lander is circling the moon, cameras aboard Athena are taking pictures shocking photographs of the outside underneath. In contemporary posts on X, Intuitive Machines equipped a standing replace at the lander and shared a few of what its cameras have captured. “Athena remains to be in very good well being, finishing lunar orbits each and every two hours, looking forward to the solar to upward thrust on her supposed south pole area touchdown web site, Mons Mouton,” one March 4 put up says.
Intuitive Machines’ 2nd moon lander, named Athena, snapped this selfie above the outside of the moon on March 4, 2025. (Symbol credit score: Intuitive Machines)In every other March 4 X put up, the corporate shared a time-lapse video of a 10-minute section from one the 39 orbits Athena will entire sooner than making its touchdown strive.”This symbol series is from a separate public affairs digital camera and is made up of 240 photographs taken over a mid-latitude area over a 10-minute span. Each and every symbol is proven as 2 frames on this series,” the put up says.
2/4: This symbol series is from a separate public affairs digital camera and is made up of 240 photographs taken over a mid-latitude area over a 10-minute span. Each and every symbol is proven as 2 frames on this series. %.twitter.com/Xwk59Ju8zZMarch 4, 2025Another March 4 video put up options Mons Mouton and notes that it is one of the vital proposed touchdown websites for long term NASA Artemis astronaut missions.3/4: For reference, Athena captured this symbol series over the Moon’s south pole area close to her supposed touchdown web site, Mons Mouton—one among NASA’s designated human touchdown websites for the Artemis marketing campaign. %.twitter.com/mQx4gbjMw7March 4, 2025Mons Mouton is close to the lunar south pole, the place NASA desires to review water ice and different native assets which may be used to toughen longer-term crewed missions to the moon.Breaking area information, the newest updates on rocket launches, skywatching occasions and extra!To lend a hand do that, Athena is wearing NASA’s PRIME-1 payload, which is able to drill down into the outside of the moon to seek for frozen water. PRIME-1, quick for Polar Sources Ice Mining Experiment-1, is composed of a drill designed to dig as much as 3 ft (1 meter) underneath the outside, and a mass spectrometer to research the pattern the tool collects.Athena could also be wearing a secondary spacecraft known as Grace, which is able to “hop” round inside a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) radius of Athena’s touchdown web site to discover, amongst different issues, the completely shadowed phase of a close-by crater.Grace will likely be aided through every other automobile using on Athena: MAPP (Cellular Independent Prospecting Platform), a small rover from Colorado-based corporate Lunar Outpost wearing the moon’s first mobile community.Athena’s project comes right through a specifically lively time for spacecraft across the moon. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which could also be flying a CLPS project, effectively touched down at the lunar floor on Sunday (March 2), starting a two-week floor project to habits experiments on the moon’s Mare Crisium area.Every other moon lander additionally has its sensors set on our nearest celestial neighbor. Resilience, from the Jap exploration corporate ispace, introduced at the identical Falcon 9 that carried Blue Ghost to orbit in January. Resilience is taking a slower, low-energy trajectory to the moon, and is anticipated to land on June 5.Intuitive Machines is focused on March 6 for Athena’s touchdown, with top hopes for good fortune above the corporate’s first project to the moon. IM-1 introduced a identical lander, named Odysseus, in February 2024. Odysseus used to be ready to succeed in the lunar floor safely, changing into the primary non-public automobile ever to take action, nevertheless it toppled onto its aspect within the procedure.”This time, confidently, we land in a extra exact place,” Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines’ senior vp of area programs, instructed House.com sooner than the IM-2 release remaining week.Protection of Athena’s touchdown strive will start at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT) on Thursday, with a focused touchdown set for about 12:32 p.m. EST (1730 GMT). A livestream of the IM-2 touchdown will likely be carried at the House.com homepage, NASA’s NASA+ streaming carrier and at the Intuitive Machines YouTube channel.
