Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission, CLPS mission with NASA and commercial payloads Options

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, surprising. Strictly speaking the mission is not cancelled but its chance of proceeding is very small, as far as I can see.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Ghe Intuitive Machines website:

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/

has just undergone a redesign, making it much more useful in advance of its first mission. There is a list of payloads:

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/_files/ug...34a345969ab.pdf

and clearly it is being set up to support the upcoming flight. No word still on landing sites, but I am thinking they are probably keeping several in play until the launch, so a delay of a day or two in launch allows them to shift to the west to maintain an early morning landing. If that is the case it makes sense to start in the west (Crisium) so later landings can go to Serenitatis or Aristarchus Plateau as needed. Basically the same strategy as the first Apollo landings used.

Phil

[Olympusmonsuk]

Ghe Intuitive Machines website:

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/

has just undergone a redesign, making it much more useful in advance of its first mission. There is a list of payloads:

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/_files/ug...34a345969ab.pdf

and clearly it is being set up to support the upcoming flight. No word still on landing sites, but I am thinking they are probably keeping several in play until the launch, so a delay of a day or two in lunch allows them to shift to the west to maintain an early morning landing. If that is the case it makes sense to start in the west (Crisium) so later landings can go to Serenitatis or Aristarchus Plateau as needed. Basically the same strategy as the first Apollo landings used.

Phil

Phil why would a LUNCH delay alter the landing site?

[Phil Stooke]

It's a very important meal. You can't just grab a sandwich from Pret.

Phil


(Oh, OK, I'll fix it)

[Phil Stooke]

Aha - now we have real news.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/in-...will-go-public/

Apart from the funding aspect of that article, at the end there is a statement that NASA has requested a south polar landing instead of a near-equatorial one. Re-planning the trajectory and so on has caused a delay to March 2023 for launch.

Elsewhere there was a comment that a 4th IM mission will be purely commercial, not a CLPS mission. 'Commercial' in this sense should be taken to include the possibility of a flight on behalf of another nation's space agency as well as purely business-oriented partners. (No, I don't have any special knowledge of the situation, but I am so used to seeing comments that no commercial clients have deep enough pockets that I wanted to point out that possibility. UAE is already flying a rover on a Japanese mission and looking at a similar arrangement with China, and Canada wants to fly a lunar mission, so there are candidates already known and could easily be more).

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Intuitive update. At the Lunar Surface Science Workshop yesterday, Jack Burns gave a presentation on ROLSES, an instrument on IM-1. It identified the landing site quite precisely, just east of the very degraded crater Malapert A. The coordinates are 80.31 S, 1.24 E. Flight now expected in the later part of the 3rd quarter of this year (c. September).

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

This is the landing site for IM-1 as currently understood. It looks like the lander has been boxed up for transport to KSC.

Phil

[mcaplinger]

Mission slipped to mid-January: https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/10/27/intui...in-mid-january/

[Phil Stooke]

If there are no more delays (a big IF, certainly) Astrobotic's lander will launch before IM-1, currently aiming for 24 December. If Intuitive Machines launches on 12 January the landings would actually happen close together, round about the 19th of January, and SLIM is also set to land at the same time.

It is possible that we will see three landing attempts in a single week. If we assume every landing happens about 2 days after sunrise (so descent imaging is not too complicated by shadows) they would occur in the order of increasing west longitude, i.e. SLIM, then Intuitive, then Astrobotic. Dates might be roughly January 18, 20 and 23 (Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday).

[Thorsten Denk]

Astrobotic seems to be Jan 25.
https://twitter.com/SpaceflightNow/status/1...942846130606349

Thorsten

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, they are landing 4 days after sunrise and aiming for a 10 day mission, so my working assumption of landing 2 days after sunrise put me 2 days out.

Phil

[Thorsten Denk]

It will be interesting to see if the other dates hold.
If so, there would still be three landings within one week (seven days)!
Thorsten

[Phil Stooke]

The landings look different now! SLIM in January still, but with Astrobotic and Intuitive both delayed a month, they could both land in the same week, around 20-23 February.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

The Intuitive Machines IM-1 lander has been named Odysseus.

https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1738205371481595985

Phil

[Thorsten Denk]

Final preparations underway for launch of first Intuitive Machines lunar lander (by Jeff Foust)
https://spacenews.com/final-preparations-un...s-lunar-lander/

There is not yet an official specific date for the launch, only "a three-day launch period for the mission in mid-February".
It might be NET Feb14.
Landing attempt on the Moon, if launched this month, will be Feb22.

Thorsten