Private Athena moon lander enters lunar orbit ahead of March 6 touchdown try

Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander has made it to the moon.

The Athena lander fired its engines for eight minutes and 12 seconds on Monday (March 3), slowing the spacecraft down and entering lunar orbit. Athena is now all set to make a landing attempt later this week.

The mission's flight team applauded a successful lunar orbit insertion after engine shutdown was confirmed, a video from Houston-based Intuitive Machines showed.

"Athena completed her scheduled 492-second main engine Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn at 6:27 a.m. CST on March 3 and is currently orbiting the moon," Intuitive Machines stated in a post on X on Monday.

Related: Private Athena moon lander beams home gorgeous views of Earth from space (photos)

Flight controllers will next analyze data to verify the lander's targeted circular orbit in order to confirm the time of Athena's expected landing attempt, which is slated for Thursday.

"Athena continues to be in excellent health and is expected to send lunar orbit selfies over the next two days before a landing attempt on March 6," the X post continued.

The Athena mission, also known as IM-2, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 26.

If all goes well, Athena will land near the moon's south pole. There, it will hunt for lunar water using a payload called PRIME-1 ("Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1"), which consists of a deep-digging drill and a mass spectrometer. It also carries a hopping spacecraft called Grace designed to explore a crater near the landing site, and MAPP, a small rover from the Colorado company Lunar Outpost.

Athena entered lunar orbit just a day after fellow Texas company Firefly Aerospace aced its own lunar landing, with the Blue Ghost lander successfully touching down on the moon at Mare Crisium.

Both Blue Ghost and Athena are part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which seeks to send the agency's science payloads to the moon on privately developed landers.

Athena's lunar orbit insertion also follows up on Intuitive Machines' historic achievement with its first lander, the Odysseus IM-1 spacecraft, which in February 2024 became the first-ever successful moon landing by a private spacecraft, despite tipping over.

Meanwhile, Japanese private space exploration company ispace is also headed for the moon. Its Resilience lander launched along with Blue Ghost on Jan. 15 and is currently on a low-energy trajectory to the moon with the aim of setting up a landing attempt in late May or early June.