Robotic missions including PRIME-1 require solar power and a view of the Earth for communication. The plan, the PRIME-1 mission will be launched next year.
“Finding a landing site where we might find ice within three feet of the surface is challenging,” said Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1 project manager at NASA ‘s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in a statement quoted by Live Science, Tuesday (9/11/2021).
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Although there was plenty of sunlight to power the payload, the surface became too warm to support the ice within the PRIME-1 drill’s range. “We need to find a ‘goldilocks’ site that gets enough sunlight to meet mission requirements, this will be a safe place to land with good Earth communications,” he said.
NASA frames the PRIME-1 mission as a key step in learning how to mine resources from the lunar surface. The agency plans to land a series of longer human missions on the moon, known as Artemis.
To make the mission sustainable, NASA argues, scientists and engineers need to practice in-situ resource use (ISRU), i.e. the practice of using resources in the local environment.
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PRIME-1 aims to deploy a drill, called the Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) that will be 3 feet deep on the lunar surface. This experiment also has a mass spectrometer which will measure the gases that TRIDENT can find from the volatiles.
NASA plans to use data from PRIME-1 to prepare for a more ambitious lunar rover mission, the Volatile Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER). The rover will also land at the south pole in 2023 and the VIPER landing site will be just west of Nobile, a crater near the moon’s south pole.
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