NASA Preps For Moon Launch: What To Know About Water-hunting Mission

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The U.S. company that made history in 2024 with an uncrewed lunar landing is looking to do it again .

The second lunar lander developed and operated by Intuitive Machines, a Houston, Texas-based space exploration company, is set to launch this week for the moon, according to NASA . The U.S. space agency is paying top dollar to finance the mission, which will see to the delivery of a number of scientific instruments that will hunt for water under the lunar surface.

Intuitive Machines etched its name in the history books a year ago when its spacecraft, Odysseus, became the first commercially-built lunar lander to ever make it to the moon. The lunar mission also marked the United State's return to the moon for the first time in more than five decades since NASA's Apollo era came to an end.

NASA's Artemis campaign envisions the moon as being a crucial pit stop to prepare U.S. astronauts and their vehicles to travel onward to Mars .

Athena, the name of the six-legged Nova-C lander, is carrying a number of scientific instruments meant to pave the way for astronauts to return to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The solar-powered Athena lander, a hexagonal cylinder capable of carrying up to 300 pounds of cargo, will prominently carry a drill and a mass spectrometer,  NASA said . Drilling operations will seek to detect and measure the potential presence of gases from beneath the lunar soil.

Other objectives including testing a a Nokia LTE 4G communications system and deploying a propulsive drone capable of hopping across the lunar surface.