NASA and the private company Intuitive Machines have announced that they have chosen a landing site for the Nova-C lander, which will go into space at the end of 2022. It will deliver a drilling rig and an experimental communication system from Nokia to the area near the Shackleton crater in the southern polar region of the Moon, it is reported on the NASA website.
Intuitive Machines became one of the three companies that won the NASA competition and were included in the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program in 2019, under which private space companies can participate in the exploration and exploration of the Moon. The company has created the Nova-C spacecraft for flights to the Earth's natural satellite and delivery of the necessary equipment weighing 100 kilograms there. Its total weight is 1.5 tons, and with the help of its Nova-C engine, it is able to fly to another place if necessary.
Intuitive Machines is currently planning to make three flights to the moon. As part of the second, designated IM-2, the company plans to deliver a Micro-Nova jumping probe and a drill to the south pole of the Moon. With their help, water ice reserves will be assessed as part of the PRIME-1 experiment (Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1), the drilling rig will extract ice samples from a depth of up to one meter, and the mass spectrometer will analyze the composition of volatile substances in it. Such work is needed for future manned missions to the moon, as ice will become the raw material for the production of rocket fuel and air.
The area near the South Pole of the Moon near the crater Shackleton.
Image source: NASA.
While PRIME-1 will explore the ice, Nokia intends to test the 4G/LTE network on the Moon. A small all-terrain vehicle developed by Lunar Outpost will travel more than 1.6 kilometers from the Nova-C module, and will try to communicate with the base station, and Nova-C will transmit data to Earth.
On November 3, 2021, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced that they had chosen a landing site for a lunar drilling rig - on a ridge near Shackleton crater. This area is illuminated by the Sun well enough for the device to receive the right amount of energy during 10 days of operation, and also provides direct visibility of the Earth for constant communication. The Nova-C space launch is scheduled for the end of 2022.
Earlier we talked about how Intuitive Machines chose SpaceX to launch its third lunar vehicle.
Alexander Voityuk
