Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – NASA decided on the Moon’s south pole as a research site to drill. The lander to search for the ice will be launched next year.
NASA and Intuitive Machines announced the landing site at Shackleton Crater at the moon’s south pole. The US Space Agency has hinted that there is ice hiding beneath the surface of the location, quoted from the Space page, Wednesday (11/8/2021).
This mission will also use Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (Prime-1).
“Finding a landing site where it’s possible to find ice within three feet of the surface is a challenge,” NASA Prime-1 manager Jackie Quinn said.
“Despite providing plenty of sunlight to power the payload, the surface became too warm to support ice with the Prime-1 drill’s reach. We needed to find a ‘goldilocks’ site that got enough sunlight to qualify for the mission, and a safe place to land with it.” good Earth communication”.
Prime-1 will develop a drill called Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (Trident). It will dig almost a meter below the surface.
The mission will also use a mass spectrometer. His job was to measure the gas that Trident discovered, a kind of element and compound that easily changes itself from gas to liquid and then to solid.
Prime-1 will be used by NASA as a way of studying the lunar surface. They plan to land a longer human mission on Earth’s satellite under the name Artemis.
However, NASA noted that scientists and engineers need to practice in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This is the practice of using resources in the Moon’s environment.
From Prime-1, NASA will use it to prepare for more ambitious lunar exploration missions. Namely, the Volatile Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land at the south pole in 2023.
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