NASA's new lunar mission: Ice-mining experiment to be launched in 2022
Zee News
The NASA aircraft will land on a ridge on the lunar South Pole and data from spacecraft orbiting the Moon indicate this location, referred to as the "Shackleton connecting ridge", could have ice below the surface.
Washington (US): NASA has announced that its ice-mining experiment, due to launch in 2022, will land on a ridge on the lunar South Pole, not far from Shackleton crater -- a location engineers and scientists have assessed for months. NASA data from spacecraft orbiting the Moon indicate this location, referred to as the "Shackleton connecting ridge", could have ice below the surface.
The area receives sufficient sunlight to power a lander for roughly a 10-day mission, while also providing a clear line of sight to Earth for constant communications. It also is close to a small crater, which is ideal for a robotic excursion. To select this final landing location, experts from NASA, Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Nokia, and Intuitive Machines created "ice-mining" maps of the lunar surface using lunar remote sensing data.
The Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will land on the lunar surface attached to a robotic lander. PRIME-1 consists of a drill paired with a mass spectrometer -- a 4G/LTE communications network developed by Nokia of America Corporation, and Micro-Nova, a deployable hopper robot developed by Intuitive Machines.
