IM-2 Nova-C lander Athena carries PRIME-1 to the Moon

On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, at 7:17 p.m. EST (00:17 a.m. UTC, Feb. 27) Intuitive Machines’ second flight (IM-2) took off from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, FL, USA, on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5.

Liftoff of IM-2! pic.twitter.com/iJ3BCekqJs

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 27, 2025

IM’s Nova-C landing platform “Athena” will bring the PRIME-1 experiment suite to the Moon’s surface for an all-time first capability demonstration of drilling, collecting, and analyzing lunar soil samples through an In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) approach.

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Mission schedule

Approximately two and a half minutes into the launch’s ascent phase, stage separation occurred, followed by the fairing detachment about a minute later. Just over 40 minutes after the lift-off, the second stage successfully released IM-2’s Athena lander. And, ultimately, four minutes later, Odin, Lunar Trailblazer, and CHIMERA GEO 1 were sequentially released into orbit, each at 20-second intervals.

Now the spacecraft will spend some hours in Earth parking orbit for autonomous commissioning and later it will perform the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) – the spaceflight maneuver needed to exit the Earth’s gravity to enter an elliptical transfer orbit towards the Moon. After orbiting in Low Lunar orbit, the spacecraft’s descent phase will end with the landing on the lunar surface. The objective is to land the Athena lunar platform in Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the Moon’s South Pole.

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The payloads

As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, the PRIME-1 mission will allow the scientific community to better understand the lunar environment and its subsoil resources. Moreover, it will demonstrate and foster in-situ resource utilization, paving the way for sustainable human exploration ahead of NASA’s Artemis campaign that will send humans back to the Moon. 

Developed and tested by NASA JPL together with Lockheed Martin Space, and part of NASA’s SIMPLEx program, the Lunar Trailblazer is a small (class D) lunar orbiter designed to detect and map water on the lunar surface to determine how its abundance and location are connected to the geology of the Moon.

CHIMERA-GEO 1 transfer ship – Epic Aerospace’s spacecraft for geosynchronous orbit – will be released into space to demonstrate its capability to transport a payload and provide complete insertion services from the drop-off GTO (Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit) up to its specific slot in GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit).

AstroForge also launched its payload, Odin (Brokkr-2), aiming to reach deep space to observe and study asteroid 2022 OB5 ahead of the future resources mining mission. After 11 months from the launch, Odin will fly by the celestial body at a distance of about 1 km.

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PRIME-1 description

Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) consists of 40 kg payload comprehensive of three instruments: The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT), the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSOLO), and a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA).

Developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin Company, TRIDENT is a 1-meter-long rotary percussive auger designed to drill into the lunar surface and extract lunar soil, regolith, or ice, up to about three feet below the surface. The drill will be commanded from Earth, contrary to what used to happen during the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts controlled the drills directly in situ.

Scientists will analyze the collected samples, each about 4 inches in length, to study the distribution of the frozen gases at different depths below the Moon’s surface. The carbide cutting teeth allow the drill to penetrate the strongest soil layers. The analysis of the extracted samples may provide key information about subsurface temperatures and mechanical properties of the soil layers around the Moon’s South Pole.

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The instruments

MSOLO, a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mass spectrometer adapted for spaceflight and lunar operations, developed by INFICON, will be used to look for potential traces of water ice by measuring the volatile content in the gases trapped inside the TRIDENT drilled samples. The outcomes will be crucial to understanding the Moon’s potential for resource utilization and, thus, the possibility to ensure sustainable long-term stays for humans on the Moon and later Mars.

The LRA is a passive optical instrument that works precision laser ranging to measure distance and which requires no power or communications from the lander. It will be adopted to support landing procedures and to define the distance of the lander from a future spacecraft orbiting or landing on the Moon. It consists of a series of eight small mirrors mounted together in an aluminum hemisphere to the lander deck. Each 1.25-cm diameter glass corner cube prism retroreflector efficiently retroreflects any laser light back to the emitting source, thus allowing easy measurement of the relative distance between the two spacecraft and the precise position of the LRA.

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The Micro-Nova hopper and a new communication system

The mission will also carry Micro-Nova, a deployable lander aiming to demonstrate the ability to carry a payload of 1kg and travel more than 2.5 km by doing long jumps over the lunar surface, the so-called “hops”. The hopper robot will also provide high-resolution imagery of the lunar surface and particularly of the craters. It will also use sensors to detect ice water presence and will make temperature measurements along its flight path.

The flux of science data collected will be transmitted to Athena, and back to Earth by means of a new communication system. Indeed, the mission will use a Nokia’s Lunar Surface 4G LTE Communication System (LSCS) to test and demonstrate reliable communications between the IM’s Nova-C lander Athena, a Lunar Outpost rover, and the Micro-Nova hopper.

^{*Cover image credits: Intuitive Machines}

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