NASA awards US firm $47M to land water-measuring payload on Moon

NASA has awarded US-based Intuitive Machines approximately $47 million to deliver a drill combined with a mass spectrometer to the Moon by December 2022.

NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen , said “We continue to rapidly select vendors from our pool of CLPS vendors to land payloads on the lunar surface, which exemplifies our work to integrate the ingenuity of commercial industry into our efforts at the Moon,”

“The information we’ll gain from PRIME-1 and other science instruments and technology demonstrations we’re sending to the lunar surface will inform our Artemis missions with astronauts and help us better understand how we can build a sustainable lunar presence,” he  added

The payload, PRIME-1, will help NASA search for ice at the Moon’s South Pole and harvest ice from below the surface. PRIME-1 will measure how much ice in the sample is lost to sublimation on Moon.