A gift that keeps giving: Athena's landing brings humanity closer to Moon

Yesterday, Intuitive Machines (IM), a private company based out of Houston, Texas, landed an unmanned vehicle, Athena, on the Moon. This is IM’s second Moon landing. Another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace, landed its Blue Ghost lander on Sunday, becoming the second private company to reach Luna. 

Both missions are part of NASA’s $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which partners with private industry to cut costs and support Artemis, a mission to return man to the Moon.

  Athena will drill in search of ice, testbed a 4G network, and launch three rovers along with a new hopping drone, Grace—aptly named after computer pioneer Grace Hopper. The earlier IM lander, Odysseus, made it to the surface in February 2024 but it didn’t stay upright. There are fears Athena has also landed awkwardly. Both landers are 4.8 metres tall and spindly — roughly the height of a giraffe. Most landers tend to be squat and boxy because it’s easier to keep such a design stable due to a low centre of gravity.

  The landers carry a host of gear. There are several privately funded payloads, as well as multiple NASA instruments. Those include a laser retroreflector to bounce back lasers beamed from Earth, and a low-frequency radio receiver for measuring charged particles. 

One of the rovers will try to establish a 4G network, using a new Nokia router, which connects rovers and the lander. If successful, this will be extended to include other lunar vehicles and eventually provide mobile services to the Artemis Mission, which envisages an orbital station around the Moon, as well as a manned lab on the surface.

  Grace hops because that may be the fastest mode of surface travel. The Moon’s lack of atmosphere makes flight impossible without using rockets, unlike Mars where NASA successfully flew a helicopter, Ingenuity. Grace will hop into a canyon so deep it has never seen sunlight. If the hopper works, it could make explorations considerably easier.

  The Blue Ghost lander from Firefly is designed for a different purpose. Firefly is contracted to deliver payloads of up to 150 kgs / trip to the lunar surface. This reusable module would be key to meeting the logistics demands of a manned mission, where astronauts work on the Moon for extended periods.

  The first load did consist of multiple scientific experiments. Apart from testing soil, Blue Ghost will deploy radiation-resistant computing equipment for testing.

  It’s already scored a major success. One of its trials, NASA’s Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), designed by Italy’s space agency, has successfully received global positioning system (GPS) signals beamed from Earth’s orbit. In theory, this means lunar locations could be mapped and placed on grids as accurately as terrestrial ones—though the process is more complex and expensive.

  This could enormously improve mapping and exploration tasks. When combined with a mobile network, it would vastly improve safety parameters for human exploration and would make it much easier to accurately plot trips between Earth and the Moon.

Note that, although the Moon is tiny, we don’t really know what one side looks like. The so-called “dark side” is permanently facing away from Earth. Also due to the absence of surface water, the Moon’s land area is roughly a quarter of Earth’s land area, though its total surface area is only about 7 per cent of Earth’s.

  Artemis aims to place humans in orbit around the Moon and land a manned mission by 2027. While the timelines may be delayed, Elon Musk has a big personal stake in the success of these missions through SpaceX. So it’s unlikely funding will be slashed. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and private Indian players have stakes in Artemis.

Space exploration has its “blue sky” aspect. That is, the discovery process may lead to no immediate payoff.

  In the very long term, meaning decades down the line, space mining may be a highly profitable venture. In the short term though, the commercial payoffs will come from adapting the technology developed and gaining a better understanding of the way things work.

  So far, space exploration has delivered solar energy, robotics, global communications, and an improved understanding of climate science. That’s quite apart from things like compact gym equipment, autonomous vehicles, hydroponics, telemedicine and GPS. Space could continue to be the gift that keeps giving.