Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 20 (Xinhua)-- NASA's Lunar Pioneer is ready to launch to the South Pole of the moon to find and collect water ice samples and try to map its abundance and distribution. The goal of this mission is to provide important data for future lunar exploration and potential Mars exploration.

▲ Photo Source: Lockheed Martin according to public information, the Lunar Pioneer, built by Lockheed Martin, is relatively small, with a width of 3.5m and a weight of about 220kg.

The Moon Pioneer was selected in 2019 by NASA's SIMPLEx (small innovative Planetary Exploration Mission) program, which will be launched as an auxiliary payload for Intuitive Machines's second robotic lunar lander mission (IM-2). The launch will also carry NASA's Polar Resource Ice Mine experiment, the No. 1 subsurface ice drill, which is not expected to be launched earlier than early 2024.

Led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, the Moon Pioneer is only 11.5ft wide after fully unfolding its solar panels. (CTOnews.com Note: about 350.52 centimeters).

The small satellite will rely on LTM instruments to collect temperature data to reveal the thermal properties of the moon's surface and the composition of silicate rocks and soil. The HVM3 Imaging Spectrometer, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, will detect and map the shape, abundance and location of water in the same area as the LTM instrument.

The detector is also equipped with a variety of scientific instruments, including laser altimeters, microwave detectors and cameras, for measuring topography, analyzing soil composition and taking pictures.

In addition, it carries two samplers, one for collecting rock and lunar soil samples and the other for scraping a small piece of water ice from the lunar surface.

▲ image source: Lockheed Martin Space Company recently received a LTM sensor built by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), LTM aims to use infrared light to map the temperature of the lunar surface and to map the changes in the minerals that make up the lunar surface. This will enable the satellite to identify where water may exist on the moon.

According to NASA, there may be much more water on the moon's surface than previously thought. For example, a recent study found that there may be as much as 1 million liters of water ice in some parts of Antarctica. These resources are essential for future lunar bases and Mars expeditions because they can be used to make oxygen, rocket fuel and other necessities.

However, it is not easy for us to obtain these valuable resources, first of all, we need to find the target area of the moon accurately and perform complex operations there.

In addition, due to the extremely harsh environment of the moon, such as extreme temperature, vacuum and small meteorite impact risk, the Lunar Pioneer also needs to have strong autonomy and adaptability.

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