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The mission is set for December 2022
NASA is planning to collect ice water from the moon’s south pole and is partnering with Houston-based Intuitive Machines to land an ice drill in December 2022.
Intuitive Machines will receive $ 47 million for the delivery of NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) and will be the first ever mission to harvest water ice from inside the moon. The lunar ice mission is part of NASA’s Artemis program, whose primary mission is to land astronauts on the moon once again in 2024.
What is Intuitive Machine’s job
According to NASA Associate Administrator for Science Missions Thomas Zurbuchen, the information they will gain from the PRIME-1 mission will allow them to learn more about how to build a sustainable lunar presence for their astronauts.
PRIME-1, which weighs 88 pounds, will be transported by Intuitive Machines on their NOVA-C lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, otherwise called CLPS. Intuitive Machines is part of other robotic machines under CLPS and will fly other objects to the moon.
Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, spoke about how it is an incredible honor to lay the groundwork for man’s return to the moon. He also said this is a good opportunity for his business to demonstrate just how capable he is.
Once PRIME-1 lands, it will use its drill to dig approximately 3 feet (1 meter) below the moon’s surface to look for buried frozen water. A mass spectrometer is also part of the project, just to see how much ice from the PRIME-1 sample is lost by sublimation, which happens in space where a solid is converted directly into vapor. PRIME-1 will provide NASA with a lot of information about the resources available on the moon and how we might use them.
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