NASA Prepares To Drill for the “Oil of Space”
Authors: Feder Judy 
Published: May 2021

“We’re going to the Moon, and we’re going there to stay this time,” has become a NASA mantra as the US competes with other countries, including China and Russia (https://jpt. spe.org/esa-roscosmos-to-mine-oxygen-water-from-moon-rocks-as-nasa-eyes-first-artemis-lunar-mission), to be the first to put humans on the Moon and Mars. The race will rely heavily on using resources available on the planetary bodies - or in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Chief among these is water, which has been called “the oil of space.”

As NASA prepares for Artemis mission astronauts to land on the Moon in 2024, it will fly at least two preliminary missions to look for water and gather information about the lunar south pole. The Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) and Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) missions, which will be launched in late 2022 and 2023, respectively, will be the first missions to study ISRU on another celestial body. They will also mark the first time NASA will robotically sample and analyze for ice from below the surface. And they will use technologies transferred and adapted from oil and gas exploration.

Reconnaissance Missions

Data from nearly 3 decades of lunar orbiter and impactor missions suggest that the Moon’s “soils,” particularly at its south pole and other regions, could contain hundreds of millions of gallons of water that could eventually be harvested and converted to oxygen, fuel, or drinkable water for human use on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But, at what concentrations? In what kinds of soils? And is the water in a form that’s accessible?

Most of the information we have about the presence of water-ice on the Moon comes from orbital measurements. The only direct evidence acquired to date came in 2009 from a sensing satellite aboard a spacecraft that was purposely crashed in the Cabeus crater. The material ejected as a result of the impact was analyzed with a spectrometer to reveal the presence of 5.6%±2.9% water-ice by mass. The form, distribution, composition, and quantity of the water-ice remain largely uncertain. The only way to reduce this uncertainty is to obtain ground-truth data by drilling exploratory boreholes in the crater. This will be the purpose of the PRIME-1 and VIPER missions.

PRIME-1 will last a week to 10 days, during which a robot will deploy a drill and mass spectrometer to harvest and preliminarily evaluate moon-ice for quality and regional heights and to determine how much of the ice is lost to a process known as sublimation, wherein the water transforms directly from solid ice into vapor, rather than first going through a liquid phase. In addition to ice, PRIME-1 will gather samples including rock samples to help date the sequence of impact events on the Moon, core tube samples to capture ancient solar wind trapped in regolith layers (unconsolidated, inorganic rocky material), and paired samples of material to characterize the presence of volatiles and to assess geotechnical differences between materials inside and outside permanent shadows. The samples will be returned to Earth and studied to characterize and document the regional geology, including the small, permanently shadowed regions. The data from the mission will help scientists understand how a mobile robot to be used on the subsequent VIPER mission can search for water at the Moon’s pole, and how much water may be available to use as NASA plans to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon by the end of the decade (Fig. 1).