NASA has finalized the landing site for a new lunar explorer. The space agency will send a robotic lander to the Moon’s South Pole in an area close to the Shackleton crater. Carrying three different technology demonstrations that will test out capabilities before sending a crewed mission to the lunar surface, the Nova-C lander will be developed by the company called Intuitive Machines.
Exploring the south pole of the Moon
The space agency chose this area of the south pole because it is believed that it could have ice below the surface, making it ideal for an ice-mining test. The Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) experiment is a drill plus a mass spectrometer, which together will drill about three feet into the surface and bring up samples of lunar soil, known as regolith, and then evaluate whether the extracted samples contain any water.
The main goal is to search for a source of water on the moon, helping sustain a crewed mission there under the Artemis program. Apart from the potential presence of ice, there are other things that are taken into consideration. The site should be somewhere there’s enough sunlight to sustain a solar-powered mission and to have a clear line of sight to our planet for communications.
4G communications network test on Moon
“PRIME-1 is permanently attached to Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, and finding a landing location where we might discover ice within three feet of the surface was challenging,” explained Dr. Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1 project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “While there is plenty of sunlight to power the payloads, the surface gets too warm to sustain ice within reach of the PRIME-1 drill. We needed to find a ‘goldilocks’ site that gets just enough sunlight to meet mission requirements while also being a safe place to land with good Earth communications.”
The landing site was selected by looking at remote sensing data of the Moon that was used to create “ice-mining maps.” In addition to drilling, Nova-C will also carry out a 4G/LTE communications network test from Nokia and a small explorer robot from Intuitive Machines.
