NASA Reveals NEW Lunar Ice-Mining Drill for Artemis Program

NASA reveals their new lunar ice-mining drill (Prime-1) that they plan on using ahead of the Artemis Program's 2024 manned mission to the moon.

In partnership with Intuitive Machines and SpaceX, they will be using SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch their scheduled moon lander with the lunar ice-mining drill aboard.

#nasa #space

Nicknamed TRIDENT, The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain is NASA’s latest attempt at finding a way to sustain humans on a trip to another planet. The drill, part of NASA’s The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1, is under construction by Honeybee Robotics in preparation for the agency’s manned Artemis Mission.

PRIME-1’s entire purpose is to gather resources from the moon to determine whether utilizing a planet’s resources would benefit astronauts. With a launch date in December 2022, PRIME-1’s leading resource will be TRIDENT, a one-meter-long auger drill with a sample capacity of 300 grams. While the drill has been in development since 2016, the project’s potential has really kicked off recently.

Originally designed to collect lunar surface samples, the TRIDENT project has now evolved to collect lunar ice — a critical part of NASA’s goal to let astronauts survive off the moon or Mars’ natural materials.

NASA has fitted Mars rovers with collection tools before. The Perseverance Rover has its own drill, albeit much smaller. The thing is, there are a few things differentiating NASA’s new lunar ice drill and the Mars samplers of the past.

The first is obvious: we’re not really getting back any Mars samples anytime soon. All surface analyses from the Mars rovers have come directly from on-board computers, with the data sent over to Mission Control in the United States. Spacecraft sensors are great, don’t get that wrong, although they’re constrained by time, budget, and the sheer size of state-of-the-art sensors.

Include the fact that the Mars Sample Return mission’s project scientist has said that we can’t actually bring back any Mars samples until 2031, and you can see where previous cracks have appeared. That and the Mars rovers didn’t have the power of a one-meter-long auger drill attached to its body.

According to NASA, PRIME-1 is “similar to prior missions on Mars, but with more “real-time” operations, and ten times the depth.” Previous, and current, Mars missions have only had the ability to dig up to 10 centimeters into the ground. TRIDENT’s capacity to dig ten times the depth of a Mars rover is dramatic enough at first glance, but the quality and amount of collectable substances increase exponentially the further down you go.

Intuitive Machines is the company behind the Nova-C lander, a payload container with a capacity of about 130 kilograms. Mid-2021, Intuitive announced that they had chosen SpaceX’s Falcon 9 as their launch vehicle, with up to 1,000 kilograms of secondary payloads attached to a dispenser.

If successful, PRIME-1 will land near the moon’s polar regions, where the rover and the TRIDENT drill will immediately begin drilling. With TRIDENT being just 1 meter long and 36 kilograms, it’ll be able to maneuver incredibly well, meaning that NASA should receive their first scanned sample within a few hours of landing.

If this mission goes successfully and proves to the world that the moon’s ice and water reservoir is accessible, then who’s to say that the same isn’t possible on other bodies like Mars? What do you think? If PRIME-1 and TRIDENT collect ice samples successfully or find water reservoirs, will NASA plan to use the moon’s resources in a future trip? Do you think they’ll instead send a rover to Mars to collect samples? Let us know in the comments below!

[appleandeveofficial]

If this mission goes successfully and proves to the world that the moon’s ice and the water reservoir is accessible, then who’s to say that the same isn’t possible on other bodies like Mars? Let me know what you guys think down below, I'm curious to know!

[nerdwatch]

Why only send 1? Why not send 2 to the north and southern poles!! Double the chances of discovery!! Then send supply ships with more sample containers and return ships and have other countries getting on the funding for it and those return ships can land near their countries giving them samples of Moon rock and other Lunar materials

[dmk]

Hopefully trident will be able to identify other materials as well; I’m hoping for proof of carbon compounds and possibly fossil nitrogen in the form of ammonia.

[turkselam]

Such quality from a small channel, thanks for the info

[indiviiduall]

Only 14k subscribers? You deserve a million

[destructorzz]

I cannot get over how much this guy sounds like NileRed

[rodanderson]

We all know how good NASA is at developing ground drills. Witness the ground drill NASA sent to Mars.

[jlmwatchman]

This was the second Lunar mining robot I've seen today. Let's use them already. Or, ah are the Aliens stopping us from going back to the Moon? What Aliens? I thought any higher intelligence would know better. Better than to travel through the emptiness of outer space. Those towers on the Moon were built be ancient Earthlings.
Oh, lets see if the drill can cut through the harder-than-steel regolith at the bottom of craters last? Or do we need to get there first?

[buddtwin]

O great another reason for nasa to delay Artemis

[erbenton]

A crew there could do a far better job with a a bigger and more powerful drill

[sodalitia]

I find it funny how they market a drill, made with off shelf parts you can find in any warehouse, as some high tech solution. Can I throw something made of home depot parts together and get multi-million contract from government?

[clydecox]

I think it's taking far too long and NASA is far too unstable because of changing political landscapes. SpaceX on the other hand could do a manned mission within a few years and bring an real core drill and really see what's up there. Then again SpaceX is primarily interested in Mars so there's that.

[jeffkelley]

Only 1 meter! You've got to be kidding us. We need to burrow deeper and adding additional coring sections to the drill should not be a problem. Ten meters should be the minimum. Why do we keep scraping the surface of other planets? We drill miles into the ice here on Earth. With robotics, we should be able to do much more.
The moon is a short distance away. Once we land on the moon and bring large boring machines these tiny attempts to find surface ice or water will be useless. Why settle for less? Better yet, why even bother when a moon colony is only a few years away?