On Wednesday, February 26 at 7:16 p.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission to a lunar transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Also on board this mission was NASA’S Lunar Trailblazer, Astroforge’s Odin, and Epic Aerospace’s CHIMERA GEO 1 spacecraft. Photos by Satnews.
This was the ninth flight of the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-8, Polaris Dawn, CRS-31, Astranis: From One to Many, and four Starlink missions.
This is the second mission of Nova-C lunar lander developed and built by Intuitive Machines. This time it carries a NASA payload called PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1), which is to be the first demonstration of in-situ resource utilization on the Moon. PRIME-1 consists of two instruments: TRIDENT drill and Msolo mass spectrometer.
Also on board are:
* Lunar Trailblazer, a small (class D) lunar orbiter, part of NASA’s SIMPLEx program, that will detect and map water on the lunar surface to determine how its form, abundance, and location relate to geology. Its mission is to aid in the understanding of lunar water and the Moon’s water cycle.
* Odin, a spacecraft for AstroForge, a company that plans to mine asteroid resources. Odin intends to head into deep space to observe near-Earth asteroid 2022 OB5 in preparation for their first retrieval mission. Odin will fly by the asteroid at a distance of about 1 kilometer, arriving 11 months after launch.
* CHIMERA GEO 1, a transfer spacecraft by Epic Aerospace to a geostationary orbit, with the aim of covering an orbital position. For this launch, CHIMERA-GEO is carrying an unidentified 16U cubesat manifested by Exolaunch.
This was the ninth flight of the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-8, Polaris Dawn, CRS-31, Astranis: From One to Many, and four Starlink missions.