SAN FRANCISCO, iNews.id – NASA has chosen a landing site for the new Moon rover. The rover robot will be sent to the moon’s south pole, in the area near Shackleton Crater.
Carrying three different technology demonstrations aimed at testing capabilities before a manned mission to the Moon, the Nova-C lander will be built by Intuitive Machines. NASA chose this south polar area because it is thought there is ice beneath the surface there, making it ideal for ice mining tests.
The Polar Resources-1 Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) is a drill plus a mass spectrometer, which in combination will drill up to three feet to the surface and bring up a sample of lunar soil, called a regolith, and then evaluate whether the extracted sample contains water.
The idea is to find water sources on the moon that could help sustain manned missions there under the Artemis program. But there are practical considerations for choosing a landing site, not just considering the potential presence of ice.
The site also needs to be somewhere that receives enough sunlight to sustain a solar-powered mission and has a clear line of sight to Earth for communications.
Editor: Dini Listiyani
