The sci fi dreams—and economic boom—that would be fulfilled by establishing a long-term lunar presence all hinge on one thing: the ability to locate, extract, and process water ice on the Moon’s surface.
Two missions are set to launch today that are hoping to take one giant leap towards making that possible.
The missions: Intuitive Machines’ second Nova-C lunar lander, named Athena, and NASA’s JPL Lunar Trailblazer satellite will spend about a week in transit to the Moon, the first step on their journey to better understand the presence of water ice on and beneath the lunar surface.
Lunar Trailblazer is expected to begin orbiting the Moon, mapping the quantity and location of water ice on the surface, while Athena descends to its landing site in the Mons Mouton region ~100 miles from the lunar South Pole.
During its ~10 day mission, Athena will deploy two payloads focused on searching for water in the lunar regolith: PRIME-1 and PLWS.
PRIME-1: NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment contains two instruments:
- A drill from Honeybee Robotics (The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain, or TRIDENT)
- A mass spectrometer from NASA (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations, or MSolo).
The meter-long drill will bore into the lunar surface in 10-cm increments, depositing the soil on the surface for MSolo to analyze. MSolo will also examine the gasses emitted during the drilling process to better understand the lunar subsurface and detect possible contamination from the Nova-C lander.
Given that the contents of the proposed meter-deep hole are largely unknown, Honeybee Robotics developed a drilling mechanism prepared to plow through any material it might encounter.
“[The drill] is a percussive augering drill, and it can transition from being wholly augering to a combination of augering percussive or just percussive, depending on the hardness of the material that it’s attempting to penetrate,” Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1’s project manager, said in a media teleconference earlier this month. “Knowing what we don’t know is really going to be key here.”
PLWS: The Puli Lunar Water Snooper from Hungary-based Puli Space Technologies is a 400-g dowsing instrument attached to Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper that will attempt to identify and measure the concentration of water in lunar soil—both near the landing site and in a permanently shaded crater nearby.
The exact concentration of water in the lunar regolith is unknown, but early evidence from both NASA’s SOFIA mission, which confirmed the presence of water on the Moon in 2020, and China’s Chang’e-5 mission indicate that it is distributed unevenly. Detecting the locations of large reservoirs will be vital for future applications.
Water rush: While NASA’s own lunar exploration mission, VIPER, was cancelled in July due to cost overruns and delays, the agency has supported private efforts through various SBIRs and its Break the Ice lunar challenge.
And the commercial sector’s thirst for lunar water is stronger than ever. In just the past year, a steady flow of companies have announced their plans to exploit the resource in the not-too-distant future.
- ispace’s RESILIENCE lander, expected to reach the Moon as early as May, is bringing water electrolyzer equipment to demonstrate the production of oxygen and hydrogen on the Moon for the first time.
- Argo Space Corporation raised $7.9M in seed funding in October to develop water-powered space transportation vehicles, with a vision of using lunar water as fuel in the long-term.
- Starpath secured a $12M seed round in August to develop a fleet of regolith harvesting rovers and a processing plant on the Moon to split lunar water into hydrogen and oxygen.
- Lockheed Martin unveiled its vision for the future lunar economy in July, which centered around the robust utilization of lunar water ice.
- Ethos Space Resources emerged from stealth in June with the aim of utilizing regolith to produce LOX on the Moon.
Why it matters: Water is obviously critical for life support on the Moon. But, when processed, the water atoms can also be split into oxygen (again, important for sustaining humans) and hydrogen (aka rocket fuel). Because of this, being able to use lunar resources in situ is critical to Artemis’ goal of setting up a sustained human presence on the Moon.
“Demonstrating that we can collect these volatiles using the tech demonstrations on board will not only help us better understand the origins of our solar system, but they will also be useful to our future astronauts for in-situ resources including drinking water, breathing air and creating rocket fuel,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s associate administrator.
