PRIME-1

Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) is a robotic NASA Lunar landing project, designed to explore for water ice on the Earth's Moon, at a permanently shadowed location near Shackleton Crater close to the Lunar south pole. If launched as currently planned, PRIME-1 will land, according to NASA's website, "no earlier than November 2023."[1]

According to NASA, if successfully deployed PRIME-1 will be the first attempt to show the feasibility of efforts on the lunar surface "to generate products with local materials," a process formally termed In situ resource utilization. Additionally, for the first time, NASA will robotically sample and analyze for ice from below the surface. Two components make up PRIME-1, both of which will be mounted to a commercial lunar lander:

  • The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT): TRIDENT will drill up to three feet deep, extracting lunar regolith, or soil, up to the surface. The instrument can drill in multiple segments, pausing and retracting to deposit cuttings on the surface after each depth increment.
  • Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo): This modified-for-spaceflight, commercial-off-the-shelf mass spectrometer will evaluate the drill cuttings for water and other chemical compounds. Soil samples from multiple depths will be analyzed.[2]

PRIME-1 will launch as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, on the Nova-C IM-2 mission.[3]

References
  1. "NASA - NSSDCA - Spacecraft - Details". nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
  2. Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  3. Apollo to Artemis: Drilling on the Moon
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