IM-2 mission thread - February 26, 2025 and onward

[brussell]

The troublesome laser altimeters (one inhibited by interlock, the other very noisy) were discussed at length in yesterday's news conference, and likely contributed to the wild fluctuations we were seeing.  You can watch that presser here.

Does anybody know which specific laser altimeters were these, like the model?

Answering my own question, a couple of old press releases suggest they may be MDA's FLARE laser rangefinders.

https://spaceq.ca/mda-to-provide-lunar-landing-sensors-to-intuitive-machines/

https://mda.space/article/mda-awarded-another-contract-to-provide-lunar-landing-sensors

And a product datasheet is available at:

https://satsearch.co/products/mda-flare-full-wave-laser-rangefinder

[brussell]

Evidence strongly suggests that the lander had significant, ~10 m/s, lateral velocity when landing.

Agreed.

Does anyone know if IM is using this tech from Advanced Navigation, or did this not pan out?  Whatever they are using for altimetry and surface-rel velocity doesn't seem to be working very well.  https://www.advancednavigation.com/case-studies/intuitive-machines-looks-to-advanced-navigation-laser-velocity-and-ranging-technology-for-autonomous-commercial-lunar-landings/

I saw that as well. Now I'm confused whether it's this or the MDA altimeter. They do use NDL velocimeter from what I've seen, so it seems this didn't work so well either. Bummers all around.

[theinternetftw]

There is a lot of new detail in this Eric Berger article:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/athena-landed-in-a-dark-crater-where-the-temperature-was-minus-280-f/

[lightleviathan]

There is a lot of new detail in this Eric Berger article:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/athena-landed-in-a-dark-crater-where-the-temperature-was-minus-280-f/

To summarize- the lander's laser rangefinder failed again, but because of a (still unknown) different reason

[theinternetftw]

There's a good bit more than that about post-failure events.

* Athena "struck the lunar surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid across the surface. As it did so, the lander rotated at least once or twice before coming to a stop". [...] "Almost immediately, the team at Intuitive Machines knew their spacecraft was dying."

* Altemus: "The solar arrays had regolith on them, and they weren't charging, the ones pointing up, enough to give us sufficient power to power the heaters to keep it warm enough to survive."

* "With the solar arrays generating only about 100 watts of power, there was not enough energy to both power the spacecraft's heaters as well as communicate back to Earth using Athena's high-gain antenna. So instead of limping along for 50 hours, mission operators decided to operate as robustly as they could for 13 hours and get down as much data as they could."

* "The lander extended NASA's drill (but did not operate it); private customers, including Nokia and Lonestar Data Holdings, were able to get some useful information from their payloads."

[Phil Stooke]

Here's a finder chart for the IM-1 landing site. Figure numbers are placeholders for a project in progress.

[LouisJ]

We can do better than that. This is a composite of several stacks of images processed with different methods and combined. Look at the object right of centre. It's a disk from the bottom of the adjacent footpad which has fallen off and curled up. The image on it is outline maps of Arizona and Maryland plus some text, visible in the pre-encapsulation images. Each footpad had a different image on it.

For all those with image processing skills -> all 28 pictures taken by the yaoki rover are now also hosted as a Kaggle dataset

www.kaggle.com/datasets/louisburtz/dymon-yaoki-lunar-rover-images-from-im2-mission/

This now includes a few more images than the original release. and also in the original YUV422 format, as sent by the rover.
+ 2 example notebooks to show how to play with the data.

We are still looking for ways to peer deeper into the dark shadows / overexposed crater ridge!

[VSECOTSPE]

A noisy altimeter and poor image correlation with LRO data for optical navigation were root causes of landing failure:

https://spacenews.com/altimeter-problems-lighting-challenges-caused-im-2-lunar-lander-to-fall-on-its-side/

[Phil Stooke]

Check out this remarkable article - well, it's the images that are remarkable. They are in a rather annoying GIF format but can be extracted.  IM-2 site seen by the High Resolution Camera on Chandrayaan 2. The gouges cut into the surface are amazing. I hope we will see pictures like this of every landing or crash site on the Moon, we can learn a lot from them.

https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/chandrayaan-2-captures-crashed-athena-lander-on-the-moon-reveals-new-insight-2767611-2025-08-07

(originally posted on the UMSF Discord site by TTarrants).

[Phil Stooke]

This is an attempt to combine the OHRC image, Chandra Tungathurthi's analysis of it, and the Yaoki camera image (posted earlier) to make a map of the IM-2 landing site. The text boxes suggest a scenario but it might not be 100% right.

[AndrewM]

Intuitive Machines Form 10-Q for Q3 2025

In March 2025, our IM-2 mission landed at the southernmost location of the Moon, 5 degrees from the south pole. While in transit, our space to ground communications brought down over 8GB of data from space over our network; delivered 3 rideshare customers to trans lunar injection orbit and assisted them with ground tracking and communication; and demonstrated precision autonomous orbit operations circling the Moon for 39 orbits over a 72 hour period. While on the surface, we demonstrated the ability to manage power in thermal conditions on the south pole surface and in a crater. With the challenge of not being able to recharge the IM-2 lander solar panels post landing, the mission was still able to complete several mission and payload milestones, including downloading 500 MB of payload customer data from the lunar surface.