The impression of an artist from the Athena spacecraft on the Moon
Nasa
A private space mission will launch for the moon This week, aimed at the most southern point ever visited on the lunar surface. The Athena spacecraft, manufactured by intuitive machines based in the United States, is expected to launch aboard a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in NASA in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 12:17 p.m., GMT on February 27 (7:16 p.m. February 26). Several other missions will also reach a turn on the same rocket, including an asteroid operating shipping.
Intuitive machines have become the First private company To successfully land on the moon last year, when its spacecraft Ulysses landed near the southern pole of the moon. Although the instruments of the spacecraft remained operational, Ulysses made a delicate landing and made a touch, limiting the amount of data that its instruments could collect and cut the short mission.
The company hopes for a cleaner landing when Athena begins her descent to the end of March. Its planned landing site is near the highest mountain in the Moon, Mons Mouton, which is about 60 kilometers from the South Pole, making Athena's attempt the southern approach to the moon of all time. If the crafts are successfully landed, it will then work for a few weeks, equivalent to a single lunar day, before the start of the lunar night and that the power is lost.
Athena will wear more than 10 NASA instruments and missions and other private companies. That's not all – the same Falcon 9 that will launch Athena on the Moon also transports three non -related spaceships. It is a spacecraft for prospecting asteroids from the Astroforge space company, which, in the first mission of this type, will examine a spatial rock for the potential metal later this year. The Lunar Trailblazer satellite of NASA, which will map water on the moon and will look for future landing points. The third spaceship, built by Epic Aerospace, is designed to help other satellites move between orbits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqomdqx0xti
Once ATHENA landed, an instrument of NASA to unravel a meter in the lunar soil to take samples, which he will then examine for possible deposits of water and other chemicals. NASA hopes to know if these are present in quantities high enough to be used by future astronauts as part of the crew of the agency's crew, which should be launched in 2027.
Several small Rovers will also be published near the landing site, including Yaoki Rover from the Japanese company Dymon, which, at 0.5 kg, is the lightest lunar rover of all time. The 10 kg larger mobile autonomous prospecting platform (MAPP), built by the space company Lunar Outpost, will explore and create a 3D card of the landing site, as well as how a 4G telephone network, built by Nokia, works in the lunar environment. Sitting above MAPP will be a much smaller robot in the size of an ant built by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which will take temperature readings from the largest rover when it drives.
Intuitive machines will also deploy a suitcase jumping robot, called Grace, which will make a series of four hops, jumping up to 100 meters in the air and traveling a distance of about 200 meters until it landed in a deep crater with permanently shaded regions. Scientists have seen evidence that these regions, which do not heat up by -170 ° C (-274 ° F), contain usable ice deposits, but we have never been directly visited. Grace will scan the bottom of this crater, which is about 20 meters from a bottom, for about 45 minutes, before jumping again.
