Private Athena moon lander beams home amazing video of south pole touchdown site

Intuitive Machines' Athena moon lander is giving us some incredible views from lunar orbit ahead of its March 6 touchdown attempt.

Athena's mission, known as IM-2, is Houston-based Intuitive Machines' second jaunt to the moon. It's part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which contracts private companies to deliver agency science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. Athena launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast on Feb. 26 and entered lunar orbit this week after a short few days in transit.

Now that the lander is circling the moon, cameras aboard Athena are capturing stunning images of the surface below. In recent posts on X, Intuitive Machines provided a status update on the lander and shared some of what its cameras have captured. "Athena continues to be in excellent health, completing lunar orbits every two hours, waiting for the sun to rise on her intended south pole region landing site, Mons Mouton," one March 4 post says.

In another March 4 X post, the company shared a time-lapse video of a 10-minute segment from one the 39 orbits Athena will complete before making its landing attempt.

"This image sequence is from a separate public affairs camera and is made up of 240 images taken over a mid-latitude region over a 10-minute span. Each image is shown as 2 frames in this sequence," the post says.

Another March 4 video post features Mons Mouton and notes that it's one of the proposed landing sites for future NASA Artemis astronaut missions.

Mons Mouton is near the lunar south pole, where NASA wants to study water ice and other local resources that could be used to support longer-term crewed missions to the moon.

To help do this, Athena is carrying NASA's PRIME-1 payload, which will drill down into the surface of the moon to hunt for frozen water. PRIME-1, short for Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1, consists of a drill designed to dig up to 3 feet (1 meter) beneath the surface, and a mass spectrometer to analyze the sample the instrument collects.

Athena is also carrying a secondary spacecraft called Grace, which will "hop" around within a 1-mile (1.6 kilometers) radius of Athena's landing site to explore, among other things, the permanently shadowed section of a nearby crater.

Grace will be aided by another vehicle riding on Athena: MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform), a small rover from Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost carrying the moon's first cellular network.

Athena's mission comes during a particularly active time for spacecraft around the moon. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which is also flying a CLPS mission, successfully touched down on the lunar surface on Sunday (March 2), beginning a two-week surface mission to conduct experiments at the moon's Mare Crisium region.

Another moon lander also has its sensors set on our nearest celestial neighbor. Resilience, from the Japanese exploration company ispace, launched on the same Falcon 9 that carried Blue Ghost to orbit in January. Resilience is taking a slower, low-energy trajectory to the moon, and is expected to land on June 5.

Intuitive Machines is targeting March 6 for Athena's landing, with high hopes for success above the company's first mission to the moon. IM-1 launched a similar lander, named Odysseus, in February 2024. Odysseus was able to reach the lunar surface safely, becoming the first private vehicle ever to do so, but it toppled onto its side in the process.

"This time, hopefully, we land in a more precise position," Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines' senior vice president of space systems, told Space.com before the IM-2 launch last week.

Coverage of Athena's landing attempt will begin at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT) on Thursday, with a targeted landing set for approximately 12:32 p.m. EST (1730 GMT). A livestream of the IM-2 landing will be carried on the Space.com homepage, NASA's NASA+ streaming service and on the Intuitive Machines YouTube channel.