It’s a thrilling week for the moon: not only did this weekend see the landing of the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost mission, but there’s another lunar landing happening imminently too. Intuitive Machines will attempt to touch down its Nova-C lander tomorrow, March 6, and NASA will be livestreaming the event so you can watch along from home.
This will be Intuitive Machines’ second lunar landing, following it Odysseus mission last year. That spacecraft did successfully make a soft landing on the moon, but the lander tipped as it came down and ended up on its side on the lunar surface, which limited its ability to collect power using its solar panels. This time, the company will be hoping for a picture perfect landing on its second attempt, with a lander named Athena.
The mission was launched on February 27 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then, it has been making its way to the moon and on Monday this week it arrived in lunar orbit. The spacecraft will complete a total of 39 lunar orbits before coming in for landing, aiming for a site at Mons Mouton near the moon’s south pole.
The spacecraft is carrying a number of payloads including NASA technology, such as an ice mining experiment which aims to test out drills and chemical analyzers that could be used for future crewed moon missions. It includes a drill and a instrument called a mass spectrometer designed to hunt for volatile compounds such as water, to aid in resource mapping for the moon.
The Athena lander will join the Blue Ghost lander on the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS program, which provides funding and support for private companies to develop lunar technology. The idea is for NASA to work with these private companies to deliver technology and supplies to the moon to support human exploration there.
“Through the Artemis campaign, commercial robotic deliveries will test technologies, perform science experiments, and demonstrate capabilities on and around the Moon to help NASA explore in advance of Artemis Generation astronaut missions to the lunar surface, and ultimately crewed missions to Mars,” NASA wrote in an update on the mission.
Live coverage of the landing will begin at 11:30 a.m. ET (8:30 a.m. PT) on Thursday, March 6, with the landing attempt itself scheduled for 12:32 p.m. ET (9:32 a.m. PT).
You can watch either using the video embedded near the top of this page, or by heading to the NASA YouTube page for the event.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.