Space travel: US company sends another lander to the moon

Almost a year after the first commercial landing of a private mission on the moon, the US space company Intuitive Machines has sent another lander to the moon. The Athena lander was launched on Wednesday evening (US local time) on board a Falcon 9 rocket from the space company SpaceX from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida, as live images from the US space agency NASA showed.

Athena is expected to be on the move for about a week and will land on the Mons Mouton mountain in the southern polar region of the moon on March 6 at the earliest. The mission is then scheduled to last around ten days. The unmanned lander is 4.3 meters high and has a diameter of 1.6 meters. It is intended to help find raw materials and water on the moon.

For this purpose, Athena has, among other things, a drill that can penetrate up to one meter beneath the lunar surface and a mass spectrometer that can detect volatile substances. In addition, Grace is a small device that hops over the moon in short flights. It is intended to take detailed surface images and explore craters. Athena also has two so-called rovers in its luggage that are intended to roll over the moon: Mapp and the very small, two-wheeled Yaoki.

Numerous companies and organizations are involved in the mission, called IM-2, including the German Aerospace Center (DLR). On board is the Lunar Radiometer (LRAD), a scientific measuring instrument for non-contact temperature measurement developed in Germany. It was developed at the DLR and the Institute of Geological Sciences at the Free University of Berlin. The mission is part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. With this program, the US space agency wants to collect a lot of knowledge on its own way back to the moon in a comparatively inexpensive and efficient way by working with private companies.

Last year, the company Intuitive Machines, based in Houston, Texas, achieved the first commercial moon landing in space history with its lander Odysseus . Odysseus was the first US device to land on the moon in more than 50 years. However, the unmanned lander tipped over and tilted when it touched down. However, data could still be collected.

Moon landings are considered to be technically very demanding – and often go wrong. Nevertheless, there are currently many attempts worldwide. Only in mid-January two more landers from the USA were sent to the moon launched: The Blue Ghost lander from the US company Firefly Aerospace is scheduled to arrive on Sunday, the Resilience lander from the Japanese start-up ispace in a few months.