SpaceX Successfully Launches Athens Lander, Next Month's Exploration Mission

The launch of the Athens lander on the IM-2 mission (photo: dock. SpaceX Webcast)

JAKARTA The second mission from the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, a project to observe the Moon using instruments and tools from various private partners, was finally launched.

After supporting Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost launch mission, NASA welcomed the launch of an Intuitive Machine ride called Athens. This is the second CLPS mission for Intuitive Machine so that its mission is called IM-2.

IM-2 was successfully launched using SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, February 27 at around 7.18 WIB. This rocket took off from the 39A Launch Complex carrying ten payloads.

About 8.5 minutes after launch, the first phase of the booster Falcon 9 returned to Earth to land on the A Shortfall of Gravity drone. The booster managed to land safely at 7.27 WIB.

Meanwhile, the top stage of the rocket is still advancing to put Athens in a translunar injection orbit. If the placement is complete, SpaceX's task will be completed and Intuitive Machine will take over the mission until the lander arrives on the Moon.

The target is that the lander will arrive at the south pole of the moon, to be precise at Mons Mouton. Trent Martin, Senior Vice President of the Intuitive Machines Space System, hopes that these landers can arrive at their designated place.

Athens carries several contents belonging to NASA, including Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1), retroflector lasers, and several commercial payloads such as its own company's Micro Nova jurisprudence.

All instruments brought have different abilities and tasks. Like PRIME-1, for example, this payload is carried to penetrate the Moon's surface down to one meter. This instrument is also equipped with a measuring device to observe the substance in the hole.