Tracking of Moon landing IM-2

On 6 March 2025, the Moon lander Athena of Intuitive Machines, also called IM-2, landed near the South pole of the Moon. We tracked this landing with the Dwingeloo radio telescope by monitoring the doppler shift of the S-band signal (2GHz). The doppler shift tells us something about the line of sight velocity of the spacecraft.

During the landing we shared our signals in a livestream, while watching NASA’s livestream ourselves. Around the landing, there was some confusion about the success of the landing attempt: in NASA’s livestream it was not entirely clear whether the lander had touched down. From our frequency data, the landing appeared to have happened around 17:28:52 UTC: from that moment, the line of sight velocity we derived from the doppler data matches that of the Lunar surface.

After a few hours Intuitive Machines announced that the landing was a partial success: the lander had tipped over. That caused the solar panels to not generate power, which left the lander only a few hours of operations on its battery. IM-2’s predecessor IM-1 met a similar fate in 2024. We also tracked IM-1’s landing with the Dwingeloo radio telescope.