A Jumping Lunar Robot Is About to Explore a Pitch-Black Moon Crater for the First Time – WIRED
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDA new age of commercial moon exploration is upon us, and one of the most exciting missions yet is about to launch—one laden with rovers, a drill, and even a hopper spacecraft that will try to “jump” into a permanently dark lunar crater to search for ice.The IM-2 mission, from Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, February 26. The lander, nicknamed Athena and about the size of a car, is partially funded by NASA, as the US space agency attempts to create a new lunar economy that can support upcoming planned human missions to the moon.“NASA and the space industry is creating a new business, getting science and payloads to the surface of the moon,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of the Florida-based space consultancy firm Astralytical. “And these uncrewed missions are preparing us to send humans.”IM-2 is funded by a NASA program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, which started in 2018 under the first Trump administration. The goal was to give money to private companies to build landers to travel to the moon, carrying NASA instruments and other equipment to the lunar surface, ahead of the planned return of humans this decade in the Artemis program. Up to $2.6 billion in funding has been earmarked through 2028, with Intuitive Machines receiving $47 million for this mission.The CLPS program has had mixed results so far. Its first mission, the Peregrine lander built by the Pennsylvania-based firm Astrobotic, suffered a fuel leak and abandoned its landing attempt in January 2024. The next CLPS mission featured Intuitive Machines’ first lander, IM-1, which landed on its side. “We were able to get some data back, but we don’t want to end up on our side on this mission,” says Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines.IM-2 will join another CLPS mission at the moon that has already launched, the Blue Ghost lander from Firefly of Texas, which is scheduled to attempt a landing in early March. Blue Ghost is targeting a region in the moon’s northern hemisphere, the Sea of Tranquillity, near where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969. IM-2, which will attempt its landing later in March, is targeting the moon’s south pole, a region of arguably greater scientific interest.Scientists think there might be ice trapped at the moon’s poles, particularly in permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs. These are craters near the poles that, because of the moon’s tilt towards the sun, never receive sunlight on their insides. Temperatures on the surface of the moon can fluctuate between -150 and 120 degrees Celsius (-250 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit) as it turns from night to daytime over the course of a lunar day (which is about the same length as a month on Earth). However, in PSRs temperatures never rise above -170 degrees Celsius.“Ice is a key volatile that we’re interested in,” says Adam Schlesinger, project manager of CLPS at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. “You could use the ice to generate propellant on the surface,” which could be used to launch back from the lunar surface to Earth, or perhaps even one day to venture to other worlds such as Mars.There are more than 10 instruments and vehicles aboard IM-2. Three of those will be deployed on the way to the moon, including a spacecraft called Odin from the Californian asteroid-mining company AstroForge, which will attempt to fly past and take pictures of a suspected metallic near-Earth asteroid later this year, which the company hopes to extract resources from in the future. “It’ll be the first time a commercial company has ever gone to deep space,” says Matt Gialich, AstroForge’s founder and CEO.IM-2 will then attempt to touch down using a combination of thrusters, a laser system to check its altitude and speed, and its landing legs. If all goes according to plan it will land in a region called Mons Mouten, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole. China and India have also landed near the lunar south pole before, but neither as close as Intuitive Machines hopes to.On board the lander is a NASA drill called Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1). The drill will attempt to burrow up to a meter into the ground and look for any ice and other materials mixed into the surface. “It’s designed to look for resources that could be extracted and used for future exploration,” says Schlesinger.After landing, IM-2 will deploy several vehicles on the surface. Two of these are rovers, one a cylindrical vehicle the size of a shampoo bottle built by the Japanese company Dymon, called Yaoki, that will take images of the surface around the lander. The other, a larger rover the size of a suitcase from the Colorado company Lunar Outpost, called MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform), will drive off into the distance at a top speed of 10 centimeters a second.The MAPP rover, inside the the silver boxlike container that will be used to lower it to the lunar surface.MAPP has a communications device from Nokia to test 4G/LTE technology on the moon, and it will also take pictures of the IM-2 lander and the surface, creating a 3D map of the surrounding location. “This is a location that Artemis astronauts might go to in the future, so it’s a very useful map to have,” says Justin Cyrus, the company’s founder and CEO.A tiny ant-like robot designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will also crawl over the top of the rover, taking “readings of how our rover is performing,” says Cyrus. “It’s going to be pretty awesome.”The other vehicle being deployed on the surface, by launching off the lander, is Intuitive Machines’ own Micro Nova Hopper. Nicknamed Grace, this machine—the size of a guitar—will use three engines to “jump” across the surface. After a couple of practice hops, Grace will then try something unprecedented—entering a permanently shadowed moon crater.The team is targeting a small crater about 200 meters from the landing site currently known simply as “H.” About 250 meters (820 feet) across, the size of a football stadium, and 20 meters (65 feet) deep, the floor of the crater never sees sunlight. That means it might be a prime location for water ice, something that has been hinted at in PSRs by data from orbiting spacecraft. Grace will jump into the crater for 45 minutes and then switch on its spotlight to illuminate the floor before jumping back out. While in the crater it will take images and readings, using a small infrared instrument designed by the German space agency and the Free University of Berlin to measure the temperature. “If the crater is cold enough, there could be water ice on the bottom,” says Max Hamm, the instrument’s project manager at the Free University.Grace also has a neutron spectrometer built by the Hungarian company Pulis Space Technologies, which will look for neutrons coming from the surface that might have been affected by hydrogen in any ice in the ground. “We’re extremely excited,” says Tibor Pacher, the company’s founder. “It’s really a first.”A diagram of the crater-exploring mission that Grace, the Micro Nova Hopper, will complete.These two instruments and Grace’s camera might tell us if there is ice in the crater. Although sheet ice sitting on the crater’s floor is “unlikely,” says Martin, it’s possible that Grace might see hints of ice mixed into the lunar soil. Such a finding would be invaluable for the return of humans to the moon. NASA wants to land astronauts at the moon’s south pole starting with its Artemis III mission on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle in 2027. Future Artemis missions might involve descending into some of the moon’s craters of eternal darkness to collect some of the ice.Eventually, astronauts might use this ice as a resource: as rocket fuel and drinking water. “If we have people there, they will need water,” says Pacher. It would also be scientifically valuable, giving us an insight into the origin of water on the moon and by extension Earth, too. IM-2 is of particular importance given that NASA’s other planned venture into a lunar crater to look for ice, its VIPER rover, was canceled last year. Grace is “the only way right now that anyone is going into a crater,” says Martin.IM-2 also highlights the broad commercial partnerships that might be possible on upcoming lunar missions. Aside from Nokia and the other companies mentioned, there is another, more unusual partner on the lander too: a clothing company from Oregon in the US called Columbia Sportswear. The company has provided two fabric-like covers for the IM-2 mission based on its clothing brands, one on top of the lander to keep IM-2 cool in direct sunlight, and one on one of the lander’s helium tanks to keep the tank warm.“We realized the same exact material that we use in our jackets and winter wear is actually qualified for space travel,” says Hasker Beckham, vice president of innovation at Columbia Sportswear. “Intuitive Machines reached out to us, and a partnership was born.”There is another left-field instrument on board too—a space-hardened data-storage device built by the Florida-based company Lonestar Data Holdings. With 8 terabytes of data on board from various companies, including a copy of the video game Starfield supplied by the game’s developer, Bethesda, the company will practice transferring data from the moon. The idea is that placing storage drives in lunar orbit or on the moon’s surface in the future might be a way to keep valuable data away from hackers on Earth. “It is like an external hard drive to the planet,” says Chris Stott, the company’s CEO.The widespread government cuts of the incumbent Trump administration have led to some uncertainty about the future of NASA’s focus on the moon. “We do not know how much they are going to continue the Artemis program,” says Forczyk, in favor of perhaps going to Mars, a preferred destination for Trump’s key adviser and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.The IM-2 mission, which is expected to last a lunar day—so a couple of weeks—on the surface, is still a sign of where a potential lunar economy could head, albeit a tentative one. “It is so new,” says Forczyk. “We’re in the baby stage.”Updated 2-24-2025 5:50 pm GMT: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Astralytical is based in Georgia. 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