Sun, Jul 21, 2024
IM-2 Search for Water Ice Slated for Late 2024 Launch
Intuitive Machines (IM), a provider of lunar landing capability, as well as infrastructure and ancillary exploration services, announced that it has selected a landing site near the Lunar South Pole for its upcoming IM-2 mission.
The goal of the IM-2 mission is to prospect for water ice and other volatile organic compounds on the Moon’s South Pole using NASA’s PRIME-1 lunar drill. The drill requires the landing site to be sufficiently stable to support the spacecraft and have a high probability of ice within one meter of the surface. Working together with NASA, the company has identified a small elliptical region about 200 meters in diameter on the Shackleton Connecting Ridge with good terrain, sufficient solar exposure for about 10 days of power generation, and in a good position for comms with Earth.
The site is within about 10 miles of the south pole, and to achieve correct alignment for solar power the mission must be launched between November 2024 and January 2025. It is currently planned for late 2024. The mission’s objective is to conduct three technology demonstrations: the NASA-funded Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), which is a paired drill-mass spectrometer instrument to explore for water ice or other volatile organic compounds; a 4G/LTE communications network produced by Nokia of America Corporation; and a deployable hopper robot named Micro-Nova, developed by IM.
Steve Altemus, Intuitive Machines CEO said, “A sold-out commercial and civil government mission early in our commercialization roadmap validates our approach to supporting an economy in deep space. Our expertise in landing site selection is world-class, and we believe the ability to identify landing areas with valuable resources will be essential to the future of the lunar economy.”
IM has pending contract decisions by commercial customers for lunar delivery, command control and communications, and autonomous missions totaling nearly $3 billion.
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