CLPS Task Order PRIME-1: mission and targets

Project start

February 27, 2025

Declared end

March 7, 2025

The start the archive declares is the start of the project, not the launch, and an end it does not declare does not mean the mission is still running.

Targets you can open in 3D:

• Moon

A declared target is what the archive files the mission’s data under, not a record of observation.

The Intuitive Machines 2 (IM-2, CLPS Task Order TO-Prime 1) mission launched a Nova-C lander, called Athena, on UT February 27, 2025. Athena landed on March 6, 2025 at (84.79S, 29.20E) in the Mons Mouton region in the South Pole region of the Moon. It carried three NASA instruments, and commercial cargo. NASA payloads included the LRA (Laser Retroreflector Array), and the payload suite Prime-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1). PRIME-1 is a suite of two instruments, the TRIDENT drill (The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain) and MSolo (Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations). MSolo is designed to identify and quantify volatiles, including those that emanate from the lander, drilling processes, and other payloads conducting operations on the surface. LRA is designed to serve as a fiducial marker of the lander on the lunar surface. MSolo and LRA have archived data in the PDS. The TRIDENT drill, a tech demo designed to demonstrate drilling into the lunar regolith, was unable to complete its science objectives due to the final roughly horizontal orientation of the lander, which prevented the drill from reaching the lunar surface. This payload has not archived data in the PDS.

Quoted in English, as the archive publishes it, read on October 4, 2026.

Identifier in the archive, which is its citation: urn:nasa:pds:context:investigation:mission.clps_to_prime1

NASA Planetary Data System, PDS Registry, investigation context products. Dates and targets read on September 29, 2026; how to cite the archive: https://pds.nasa.gov/datastandards/citing/

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