Drilling down for the Moon

Where no European has gone before, a mighty drill will. This bold tool is set to search for water ice beneath the Moon’s surface in 2027.

ESA’s Prospect mission is sending a drill and a science lab to work together near the lunar South Pole. Conditions there, near permanently shadowed craters, may offer the best chance of finding potential sources of water and oxygen for future explorers.

In this image, one of the engineers who knows the drill best watches it at work. Christian Panza, Prospect’s technical lead at Leonardo Space Division, follows its movements after it was deployed from a panel similar to the one it will fly on. This milestone brings Europe one step closer to the Moon.

Digging into the Moon means working through very cold and abrasive layers of dust and rock called regolith. Prospect’s drill has the power to cut up to a metre down while scanning for signs of water ice at the same time.

The drill will extract a sample and transfer it to a miniaturised laboratory, where it will be heated to almost 1 000 °C.

The results will confirm whether we can find water by the Moon’s coldest craters, and if so, how we can use it and where it came from.

Prospect is not about mining the Moon. Drilling allows access to untouched soil while protecting pristine samples for accurate scientific analysis. Discovering water and other volatiles could revolutionise our journey back to the Moon and beyond.

Prospect, built by Leonardo, will reach the lunar surface with the Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander on the IM-4 mission, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

More content on Prospect coming soon. Stay tuned!