NASA’s Polar Ice Experiment Paves Way for Future Moon Missions

An innovative NASA experiment is preparing for its journey to the Moon as part of Intuitive Machines’ second launch to the lunar surface. The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will be delivered through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative on the next lunar flight. Designed to investigate the Moon’s subsurface, PRIME-1 will demonstrate groundbreaking technology to extract and analyze lunar soil, paving the way for sustainable human exploration under NASA’s Artemis campaign. In this video, Jackie Quinn explains how PRIME-1’s two key instruments – the Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrains (TRIDENT) and the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSOLO) – will work together to search for resources beneath the lunar surface. The Athena lander, carrying PRIME-1 and other NASA technology demonstrations and science investigations, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center no earlier than Feb. 26.

What is said in the film

When we eventually build infrastructure to enable sustained human presence on the moon, we're going to need some of the engineering data that Prime-1 will provide. My name's Jackie Quinn. I'm from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and I'm the Prime-1 project manager. Prime-1 stands for Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment One, and Prime-1 is a payload that's manifested and integrated onto the Intuitive Machine's second lunar Lander, Athena. Prime-1 is comprised of two instruments, a drill and a mass spectrometer.

The drill is called Trident. The Trident drill has the ability to take a sample from depth and bring it to the surface for evaluation by the accompanying instrument, M-Solo. M-Solo is a commercially manufactured mass spectrometer that has been ruggedized for Space Flight. Collectively, these two instruments will analyze across discrete depths, lunar soil and tell us what gases are located at depth down to 1 meter. We're also going to get some interesting geotechnical data from the Trident drill.

All of the data that's gleaned from either M-Solo or Trident will inform future Artemis missions as they look to design habitation, capability, long term sustained presence on the lunar surface.

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