KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — A SpaceX launch this week carrying commercial company Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander is bringing along for a free ride a special camera cooked up by students at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Called EagleCam, named after the school’s mascot, it’s one of 12 payloads flying on the IM-1 mission’s Nova-C lander named Odysseus that’s trying to become the first commercial lander on the moon. It’s set for liftoff atop a Falcon 9 rocket from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A at 12:57 a.m. Wednesday. The target lunar landing is on Feb. 22.

Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus, who cofounded the Houston-based company in 2013, graduated from ERAU’s Daytona campus in 1987. He was honored with a distinguished alumni award in 2019 by the university.

“And so I offered them a gift of appreciation to fly 3 kg (6.6 pounds) of payload to the surface of the moon. And, you know, typically, that would be about $3 million,” he said Monday during an interview with the Orlando Sentinel. “I said I’d like to work on a project with the faculty and students, and you guys build the payload. And we’ll fly it for free.”

The mission is funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to build the lander, procure a launch service provider and deal with all the communication needed to fly up six of the 12 payloads. The other six, including EagleCam, are customers lined up by Intuitive Machines to share the cost and include Columbia Sportswear, which is flying some of its thermal protection material to keep the moon lander’s avionics safe.

The result is EagleCam, which will be ejected from the lander about 100 feet before touchdown and hit the surface of the moon first at about 22 mph all the while taking photographs of the lander as it makes its descent to the surface.

“What they’ve done is not only created the camera, but they’ve been able to stitch the images together to get a 360-degree view of the surroundings — the moon, the moon and the Earth, the lander, and so those are going to be some pretty impressive pictures if the whole thing works,” he said.

It would mark the first time a university-built payload has made it to the surface of the moon, according to Embry-Riddle officials.

“What’s interesting is that we had students, undergraduate, graduate, Ph.D. students and faculty all working on it, and we got to work closely with them,” Altemus said. “They’ve done a fantastic job building the camera. We’ve tested it together as an integrated team, and they are just brimming with excitement.”

If it works, it will also be the first photo of a lunar lander as it lands, something the Japanese space agency JAXA tried with its partially successful SLIM lander in January, but photos of the actual landing were not transmitted.

The EagleCam would also be the first use of Wi-Fi on the moon, the university states on its project website.

“We’re trying to get those high-priority images down as evidence that we’ve landed safely,” Altemus said noting the goal is to get those images back and posted within the hour of landing.

The relationship between the university and Intuitive Machines has continued beyond this first project as well, partnering again with Columbia Sportswear for a scholarship and fellowship program to promote STEM education for women.

One of the program’s recipients is grad student Taylor Yow who has had a major role in completing the EagleCam project and discussed her efforts during a teleconference Monday. She detailed just how this device is going to survive its fall to the surface.

“To prepare for that we did a ton of drop tests,” she said. “We modified a steel box essentially filled it with lunar regolith and then calculated what the impact force would be on the lunar surface and then how high we would need to be here on Earth to simulate that exact impact force.”

EagleCam has both an external and internal structure to protect the four small cameras within, and that includes a layer of rubber to help deal with impact.

In addition to photographing the landing, the device will work in tandem with one of NASA’s payloads to provide data on the lander’s dust plume. It also will feature a technology developed at KSC to use an electric field to to battle dust accumulation on two of the camera lenses.

“There’s also this sense of calm kind of coming over our group as a whole. We’ve worked on this project for so long, and we literally put in blood, sweat and tears into building this,” Yow said. “We’ve done the best that we can and we trust in our work. It’s exciting, but it’s, ‘We’re ready for it to go’ too.”