posted 10-16-2020 04:19 PM               

NASA Selects Intuitive Machines to Land Water-Measuring Payload on the Moon

NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines of Houston approximately $47 million to deliver a drill combined with a mass spectrometer to the Moon by December 2022 under the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. The delivery of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment known as PRIME-1 will help NASA search for ice at the Moon's South Pole and, for the first time, harvest ice from below the surface.

"We continue to rapidly select vendors from our pool of CLPS vendors to land payloads on the lunar surface, which exemplifies our work to integrate the ingenuity of commercial industry into our efforts at the Moon," said NASA's Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen. "The information we'll gain from PRIME-1 and other science instruments and technology demonstrations we're sending to the lunar surface will inform our Artemis missions with astronauts and help us better understand how we can build a sustainable lunar presence."

PRIME-1 will land on the Moon and drill up to 3 feet (approximately 1 meter) below the surface. It will measure with a mass spectrometer how much ice in the sample is lost to sublimation as the ice turns from a solid to a vapor in the vacuum of the lunar environment. Versions of PRIME-1's drill and the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations, or MSolo, will also fly on VIPER, a mobile robot that also will search for ice at the lunar South Pole in 2023. NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon's South Pole the following year.

"PRIME-1 will give us tremendous insight into the resources at the Moon and how to extract them," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington. "Sending this payload to the Moon is a terrific example of our scientific and technology communities coming together with our commercial partners to develop breakthrough technologies to accomplish a range of goals on the lunar surface."

STMD's Game Changing Development program funds PRIME-1. Honeybee Robotics of Pasadena, California, is developing the ice-mining drill. NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in partnership with INFICON of Syracuse, New York, is developing the mass spectrometer.

The data from PRIME-1 will help scientists understand in-situ resources on the Moon. PRIME-1 contributes to NASA's search for water at the Moon's poles, supporting the agency's plans to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon by the end of the decade. PRIME-1's early use of the drill and MSolo helps to increase the likelihood of reliable operation of those payloads on VIPER's mobile platform in the following year.

posted 01-13-2021 10:00 AM               

Intuitive Machines Selects SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket for Second Moon Mission

There are currently five awarded Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions to the lunar surface in the next three years. Intuitive Machines (IM) has two of the missions and both will be launched by SpaceX.

"Signing with SpaceX for our IM-2 Polar Mission, our second scheduled lunar landing, is more than affordable quality lunar transport," said IM President and CEO, Steve Altemus. "Launching Nova-C on a rocket with a proven record of reliability and outstanding value is an assurance to NASA and our commercial payload customers that IM is dedicated to sticking the landing in back-to-back Moon missions."

NASA awarded IM the company's second payload delivery contract award under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, October 16, 2020. IM has packaged the CLPS payload with two other high profile NASA technology payloads into IM-2 Polar Mission.

"Our Lunar Payload and Data Service (LPDS) program matures with each awarded mission to the Moon," said Altemus. "That maturity is essential for creating a reliable and repeatable lunar landing service that brings us closer to sustained lunar exploration and development."

IM-2 Polar Mission will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 2022.

"We're honored to launch Intuitive Machines' important missions to the lunar surface," said SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Tom Ochinero. "These missions, in partnership with NASA, will help further the goal of extending humanity's reach beyond Earth."

posted 11-04-2021 11:53 AM               

NASA, Intuitive Machines Announce Landing Site Location for Lunar Drill

In late 2022, NASA will send an ice-mining experiment attached to a robotic lander to the lunar South Pole on a ridge not far from Shackleton crater – a location engineers and scientists have assessed for months. NASA and Intuitive Machines, an agency partner for commercial Moon deliveries, announced the location selection Nov. 3.

Above: Illustration of Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander with a depiction of NASA’s Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) attached to the spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. (Intuitive Machines)

NASA data from spacecraft orbiting the Moon indicate this location, referred to as the "Shackleton connecting ridge," could have ice below the surface. The area receives sufficient sunlight to power a lander for roughly a 10-day mission, while also providing a clear line of sight to Earth for constant communications. It also is close to a small crater, which is ideal for a robotic excursion.

These conditions offer the best chance of success for the three technology demonstrations aboard. This includes the NASA-funded Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) – which 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.

"PRIME-1 is permanently attached to Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander, and finding a landing location where we might discover ice within three feet of the surface was challenging," said Dr. Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1 project manager at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "While there is plenty of sunlight to power the payloads, the surface gets too warm to sustain ice within reach of the PRIME-1 drill. We needed to find a 'goldilocks' site that gets just enough sunlight to meet mission requirements while also being a safe place to land with good Earth communications."

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.

After landing, the PRIME-1 drill, known as The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT), will attempt to drill up to three feet deep, extract lunar soil – called regolith – and deposit it on the surface for water analysis. PRIME-1's other instrument, the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo), will measure volatile gases that readily escape from the material excavated by TRIDENT.

Above: A data visualization showing the area near the lunar South Pole on a ridge not far from Shackleton — the large crater on the right — selected as the landing site for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, which will deliver technology demonstrations to the Moon's surface under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. The conditions at the site offer the best chance of success for three technology demonstrations onboard. (NASA)

PRIME-1 will be the first demonstration of finding and extracting resources on the Moon. Advancing these types of technologies are critical to establishing a robust, long-term presence in deep space, including at the Moon as part of the agency's Artemis missions. Simply operating and drilling into the tough lunar surface will provide valuable insight to engineers for future lunar missions, such as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, mission, which is slated to land at the lunar South Pole in late 2023.

While PRIME-1 will investigate the resources below the lunar surface, Nokia will set out to test its space-hardened 4G/LTE network. A small rover developed by Lunar Outpost will venture more than a mile away from the Nova-C lander and test Nokia's wireless network at various distances. The rover will communicate to a base station located on Nova-C, and the lander will communicate data back to Earth. This demonstration could pave the way for a commercial 4G/LTE system for mission-critical communications on the lunar surface. This includes communications and even high-definition video streaming from astronauts to base stations, vehicles to base stations, and more.

Nearby, Intuitive Machines' Micro-Nova will aim to deploy to the surface and hop into a nearby crater to acquire pictures and science data before hopping out. It will then send the data back to Nova-C. Micro-Nova can carry a two-pound payload more than 1.5 miles to access lunar craters and enable high-resolution surveying of the lunar surface. This demonstration could help pave the way for additional commercial lunar exploration services. In the future, scientists may have the opportunity to outfit a hopper with their own small science instruments, such as cameras, seismometers, lunar ranging systems, and more.

"These early technology demonstrations employ innovative partnerships to provide valuable information about operating on and exploring the lunar surface," said Niki Werkheiser, director of technology maturation for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The data will inform the designs for future in-situ resource utilization, mobility, communication, power, and dust mitigation capabilities."