NASA announced Wednesday that it will send an ice-mining experiment to the Moon’s south pole, which will be put into orbit late next year.
The mission will visit a ridge close to Shackleton Crater by the end of 2022, an area where NASA engineers and scientists believe there may be ice beneath the surface.
This region, which has been studied for ‘months’, receives enough sunlight for a 10-day mission for a lander, while still in clear vision for communications.
scroll down for video
This will be the first time that resources will be explored and extracted on the Moon, which could help NASA establish a space presence, especially for the upcoming Artemis mission.
NASA is working on a commercial delivery mission to the Moon with the agency’s partner, the Intuitive Machine. It will use Intuitive’s Nova-C lander.
NASA will send an ice-mining experiment to the Moon’s south pole, which will be determined in late 2022 using the Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C lander (pictured).
The mission will head toward a ridge close to Shackleton Crater (pictured) by the end of 2022, an area where NASA engineers and scientists believe there may be ice beneath the surface.
The agency said the field and the conditions that accompany it provide the “best chance” to prove that three technologies will work on the upcoming robotic lander:
- Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (Prime-1).
- A 4G/LTE communication network developed by Nokia of America Corporation.
- and Micro-Nova, a deployable hopper robot developed by Intuitive Machines.
The Prime-1 Permanently Intuitive Machine is attached to the Nova-C lander, and is looking for a landing location where we can reach within three feet of the surface, said Jackie Quinn, Prime-1 project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space. Can you see the snowflakes inside? . Finding it was challenging. center, in Statement.
‘While there is plenty of sunlight to power the payload, the surface becomes hot enough to place the ice within reach of the PRIME-1 drill. We needed to find a ‘Goldilocks’ site that would receive enough sunlight to meet mission requirements, as well as a safe place to land with good Earth communications.
A lander at Shackleton Crater gets enough sunlight for a 10-day mission
NASA in October 2020 Chosen Before the 2024 Artemis mission, Nokia will build the first cellular network on the Moon.
After the lander lands on the Moon’s south pole, the Prime-1 drill, known as Trident, will attempt to drill three feet below the lunar soil (regolith) and look for water once it comes to the surface. will do
The other PRIME-1 instrument, MSolo, will measure gases emanating from the excavated Regolith Trident.
A group of researchers – NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Nokia, Arizona State University and Intuitive Machines – created ‘ice-mining’ maps of the surface using remote sensing data.
‘Operations and drilling only into the hard lunar surface will provide engineers with valuable insights for future lunar missions, such as the Volatile Probe Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, mission, which is set to land at the lunar south pole in late 2023. ‘ NASA said in the statement.
Nokia will test cellular networks with a rover developed by Lunar Outpost Enterprise, which is more than a mile away from the Nova-C lander, to test the strength of the network.
If successful, it could pave the way for ‘a commercial’ 4G/LTE network on the lunar surface, which includes high-definition video from astronauts to base stations, vehicles to base stations, NASA said.
‘These early technology demonstrations employ innovative partnerships to provide valuable information about operations and exploration on the lunar surface,’ explained Nicky Verkheiser, director of technology maturity for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
‘The data will inform designs for future in-situ resource utilization, mobility, communications, power and dust mitigation capabilities.’
.