How Will We Extract Water on the Moon

We know the Moon contains water, but, could future astronauts access and make use of it? That’s the goal. At NASA, we’re actively trying to answer that question. Once it lands at the lunar south pole, our PRIME-1 — Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 – will robotically sample and analyze ice from beneath the lunar surface, contributing to our search for water on the Moon: https://go.nasa.gov/2QygCmF Producers: Jessica Wilde, Scott Bednar Editor: James Lucas

What is said in the film

How will we extract water on the Moon? We Asked a NASA Technologist. NASA's Artemis missions will establish the first long-term human presence on the lunar surface. Living and working on the lunar surface will require using resources that are already present there, like water ice, which can be used for life support and fuel. The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1, or PRIME-1, will be deployed to the lunar south pole by our commercial lunar lander partner, Intuitive Machines.

PRIME-1 is intended to drill for water on the lunar surface. PRIME-1 is the combination of two instruments — a drill built by Honeybee Robotics called TRIDENT, which stands for The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain and the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations, or MSolo, which is a commercially available mass spectrometer from our industry partner, INFICON, that we have modified for operation in the harsh space environment. TRIDENT will drill into the lunar surface, taking one small bite deeper into the soil at a time and bringing that sample up and depositing it on the lunar surface. MSolo will then evaluate those samples as they arrive on the surface to identify and measure the composition of water and other volatiles emanating from the samples. The objective of PRIME-1 is to inform NASA's plans for mining resources on the lunar surface, as well as mission operations for a future NASA lunar rover mission called VIPER.

So how will we extract water on the Moon? The PRIME-1 mission will set the foundation for future resource utilization on the Moon, a key component for the success of upcoming Artemis missions, as well as expanding human exploration of our solar system. We Asked a NASA Technologist. NASA. A NASA 360 production.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/How Will We Extract Water on the Moon). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.