History might be made this week.
On Thursday, the space-exploration company Intuitive Machines is planning to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. If it’s successful, this will be America’s first soft landing on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program. Here’s everything you need to know about landing:
What’s happening and how can I watch it?
The Nova-C lander, called Odysseus (“Odie” for short), is scheduled to land on the lunar surface on Thursday, February 22, at 5:49 p.m. ET.
NASA will have livestream coverage of the event across its channels (including on NASA TV) starting at 4:15 p.m. ET on that date. Intuitive Machines also plans to host a live stream on the dedicated IM-1 mission website page.
Odie is set to land near the lunar south pole at a crater called Malapert A. This is very close to Malapert Massif, which is one of the proposed landing sites for Artemis III. That will be the first crewed landing of the Artemis program, which is currently scheduled for September 2026, and will be the first time humans have set foot on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
What is Intuitive Machines?
Intuitive Machines was founded in 2013. In 2018, the Houston-based company was selected to be part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS is NASA’s initiative to partner with private companies to deliver science and technology payloads to the surface of the moon as part of the Artemis program.
Intuitive Machines will fly three separate missions with its Nova-C lunar lander as part of CLPS; IM-1 is the first. All three are scheduled to fly in 2024. It’s worth nothing that a previous spacecraft that is also part of NASA’s CLPS program, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, launched in January 2024. However, it suffered a propellant leak after launch and was unable to attempt a moon landing. It ended up burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
What is Odysseus’s mission after it lands?
The main mission objective is a technology demonstration for the Nova-C lander—basically, Intuitive Machines wants to prove that its lunar lander works and is capable of delivering payloads to the moon. If it soft lands, then that’s a successful mission.
However, the lander is also carrying science experiments and instruments. If the company achieves landing on February 22, it will have about a week of lunar day for this science, which includes studying autonomous navigation on the moon and how human activity affects science on the moon. One rotation of the moon lasts 28 Earth days, so days on the moon are two weeks long (and so are lunar nights). Once lunar night falls, and the temperatures get as low as -200 degrees F, the lander will likely go dark forever.
