NASA has announced a mission where it will aim at making water on the moon by developing a lunar rover to find and analyze water and other materials trapped in frozen parts at the moon's poles.
The moon has always been a subject of curiosity for NASA scientists. The space agency is taking steps to make water on the moon's surface. The mission has been named Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) and will be launched in November 2017. The entire mission will reportedly last for a week.
NASA is currently in the process of developing a rover that will find and analyze materials including water that has been trapped in the frozen parts of the moon's poles. The entire mission is reportedly under a fixed $250 million budget. NASA scientists will use solar energy to power the rover's systems and science instruments.
"To do a mission of any significance (at the lunar poles) it would take nuclear power, but we don't have that kind of money," said William Larson, a recently retired project manager at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "Solar-powered missions are more affordable and that's the way we're going to try to go."
The schedule for the mission has already been chalked out, leaving scientists with lots of things to do in a very short timeline. As the rover lands on the moon, it will have about two and half days of sunlight which will help in its search for hydrogen. After that, the rover will experience 2 days of shadow when it will hibernate. During the next five days, the rover will drill about 1 meter deep into the ground to extract a sample for mineral analysis.
"The primary mission is lunar ice prospecting, but since we're there and since we don't know if we'll find water, we wanted to also demonstrate that we can extract oxygen from the lunar soil," Larson told Discovery News. "That is the most challenging timeline of any surface mobility mission NASA has ever attempted before -- and we're trying to do it on the cheap."
NASA plans to partner with the Canadian Space Agency on the project. A simulated mission has already been conducted in Hawaii this summer.
