A space company based in Houston has revealed an intriguing glimpse of its newest mission—an image series depicting its robotic spacecraft soaring over the Moon’s south pole near its designated landing area.

The focus is Mons Mouton, one of the lunar locations considered by NASA for future Artemis astronauts. On March 3, Intuitive Machines’ Athena moon lander entered lunar orbit, just a day after its rival, Firefly Aerospace, achieved a successful Moon landing.

This represents Intuitive Machines’ second mission to the Moon. Last year, the company made history by becoming the first private entity—not associated with a government space agency—to successfully touch down on the lunar surface without a catastrophic failure. Nonetheless, its Odysseus lander experienced damage, breaking a strut and ending up on its side, but still managed to transmit some data.

The recent mission, referred to as IM-2 or PRIME-1, is set to land on the Moon at 11:32 a.m. CT on March 6. Intuitive Machines and NASA will host live coverage of the event starting at 10:30 a.m. CT.

If this mission is successful, it will serve as one of the first on-site demonstrations for resource detection on the Moon. The lander is fitted with a drill and a mass spectrometer to analyze possible gases in the lunar soil. Moreover, a Laser Retroreflector Array will bounce laser signals back to orbiting or arriving spacecraft, providing a stable reference for future missions. Other instruments will evaluate a surface communications system and deploy a drone capable of hopping across the lunar terrain.

Athena is the second lander of the year supported by Commercial Lunar Payload Services. NASA has allocated $2.6 billion in contracts to private companies for transporting scientific equipment to the Moon and gathering essential data.

However, landing on the Moon continues to pose a considerable challenge. The Moon’s exosphere has nearly no atmospheric resistance to decelerate spacecraft, and there are no GPS systems available for navigation.

Intuitive Machines’ previous landing was influenced by gravity and inertia, making the spacecraft more susceptible to tipping. The Japanese SLIM lander encountered a similar problem. Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Florida, stated, “Everything on the Moon is six times more prone to tipping.”

Trent Martin, the senior vice president of Intuitive Machines’ space systems, clarified that the rough landing of the Odysseus lander was due to a malfunction with its laser altimeter, which was intended to gauge altitude just before landing. Instead, flight controllers had to depend on onboard cameras, which lacked precision, resulting in a tougher landing than anticipated.

After an investigation, the company executed 85 enhancements to boost landing accuracy. These refinements should enable Athena to land at angles of up to 10 degrees—or possibly more—while still fulfilling its mission goals.

Meanwhile, NASA is addressing issues with another spacecraft that launched alongside Athena. Engineers initially made contact with NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer on launch day but lost communication the next morning, Feb. 27. The team is currently collaborating with ground stations to restore telemetry and diagnose power system problems, although no further updates have been released.