NASA’s Ice-Mining Lunar Mission in 2022 to find resources on Moon

NASA announced that its ice-mining experiment, due to launch in 2022, will land on a ridge on the lunar South Pole, set to head into orbit late next year. The rover will land not far from Shackleton crater — a location engineers and scientists have assessed for months and believe it could have ice below the surface. NASA data from spacecraft orbiting the Moon indicate this location, referred to as the “Shackleton connecting ridge”.

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.

For the first time, resources will be found and extracted on the moon, which could help NASA establish a presence in space, particularly for the upcoming Artemis missions. Once the lander touches down at the moon's south pole, the PRIME-1 drill, known as TRIDENT, will try to drill up to three-feet worth of lunar soil (regolith) and look for water once it's on the surface. MSolo, the other PRIME-1 instrument, will measure gases that escape from the regolith TRIDENT excavated.