Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA is sending a lander to drill for ice on the moon’s south pole

By

NASA has chosen the landing site for a new lunar explorer: A robotic lander that will be sent to the moon’s south pole in an area near the Shackleton crater. Carrying three different technology demonstrations which aim to test out capabilities ahead of a crewed mission to the moon, the Nova-C lander will be built by the company Intuitive Machines.

Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander with a depiction of NASA’s PRIME-1 attached to the spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.
Illustration of Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander with a depiction of NASA’s Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) attached to the spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines

NASA selected this area of the south pole because it is thought that there could be ice below the surface there, 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 in combination will drill up to three feet into the surface and bring up samples of lunar soil, called regolith, and then evaluate whether the samples being extracted contain any water. The idea is to search for a source of water on the moon which could help sustain a crewed mission there under the Artemis program.

Recommended Videos

But there are practical considerations to choosing a landing site, not only considering the potential presence of ice. The site also needed to be somewhere which receives enough sunlight to sustain a solar-powered mission and to have a clear line of sight to Earth for communications.

Related

“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 in Florida. “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.”

A data visualization showing the area near the lunar South Pole on a ridge not far from Shackleton selected as the landing site for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander.
A data visualization showing the area near the lunar South Pole on a ridge not far from Shackleton – the large crater on the right – selected as the landing site for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, which will deliver technology demonstrations to the Moon’s surface under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. NASA

The landing site was selected by looking at remote sensing data of the moon which was used to create “ice-mining maps.” In addition to the drill, Nova-C will also carry a 4G/LTE communications network test from Nokia and a small explorer robot from Intuitive Machines. The robot, called Micro-Nova, will explore a nearby crater and collect pictures and science data.

The mission, designated IM-1, is expected to launch in early 2022.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Another piece of NASA’s mega moon rocket ships out
Crews moved the cone-shaped launch vehicle stage adapter out of NASA Marshall’s Building 4708 to the agency’s Pegasus barge on August 21. The barge will ferry the adapter first to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, where it will pick up additional SLS hardware for future Artemis missions, and then travel to NASA Kennedy. In Florida, teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems will prepare the adapter for stacking and launch.

Even while NASA is struggling with Boeing's new crewed Starliner spacecraft, it is continuing work on another key piece of space infrastructure: its Space Launch System, or SLS rocket that is designed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond. Parts of the new rocket are arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and now another key piece is on its ways: the launch vehicle stage adapter.

Standing at 322 feet tall when fully stacked, the SLS is NASA's most powerful rocket to date and has already been on a test flight around the moon as part of the Artemis I mission in 2022. Now, NASA is preparing for its first crewed flight using the rocket, which will be the Artemis II mission scheduled for September 2025. Unlike NASA's current woes with the Starliner spacecraft, which ferries astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station, the Artemis II mission will use a different spacecraft called the Orion.

Read more
NASA answers all of your questions on the troubled Starliner mission
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft docked at the space station.

NASA has updated an FAQ page on its website with the latest information on the state of Boeing Space’s beleaguered Starliner mission.

With so much speculation surrounding the state of the spacecraft, the page offers a definitive guide on where the mission is at right now.

Read more
NASA agreement with oil company BP could see its technology used on moon
An artist’s concept of an Artemis astronaut deploying an instrument on the lunar surface.

While its technology is most often used to drill for oil here on Earth, oil company BP has entered into an agreement with NASA that could see its technology used to drill for resources on the moon.

The agreement was announced this week, and says the company will work with NASA to "support common goals in space exploration and energy production." That involved sharing technology and technical expertise, particularly about how energy production can operate in extreme environments. This could be applicable to future NASA plans for exploration of the moon and Mars, both of which will require significant power generation.

Read more