The Grace hopper – leaping from light to permanent shadow
The Grace hopper – leaping from light to permanent shadow
The south pole hopper of the IM-2 mission, deployed from the Athena lander, will search for water ice by jumping into a permanently shaded crater near the Moon's south pole. Developed by the company Intuitive Machines, this hopping drone resembles a smaller version of the Athena lander and is powered by small jets. The hopper, named Grace, carries three payloads on board. The optical system, developed in the United States, consists of a wide-angle camera for terrain imaging and a medium-focal-length camera for higher-resolution images, the latter of which is pointed towards the ground. The Puli Lunar Water Snooper is a neutron spectrometer from Hungary, while the Lunar Radiometer (LRAD), developed by DLR and FU Berlin, comes from Germany. Grace is named after the American computer scientist Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992).
