WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – A Texas high tech company has won a $47-million contract to search for frozen water resources at the South Pole of the Moon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a press release.
The delivery of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) will help NASA search for ice at the Moon’s South Pole and for the first time extract ice from below the lunar surface, the release explained.
PRIME-1 will land on the Moon and drill up to three feet (about one meter) below the surface, then measure with a mass spectrometer how much ice in the sample is lost to sublimation as the ice turns from a solid to a vapor in the vacuum of the lunar environment, according to NASA.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
