Prospect's lunar drill

View of Prospect's robotic drill set to fly to the Moon’s South Polar region in search of volatiles, such as water ice.

Prospect is a suite of instruments that will drill up to at least one metre depth beneath the lunar surface, extract samples, and process them in a mini lab. The combination of robotic drill and sample analysis package is designed to identify volatiles trapped beneath the surface at extremely cold temperatures down to –150 °C.

The robotic drill, called ProSEED, features a multispectral imager and a permittivity sensor to support the remote detection and analysis of volatiles, as well as the mineralogy of the regolith at the landing site.

The miniaturised laboratory ProSPA will receive the samples from the drill via a carousel with multiple ovens, seal them, and heat them to extract the cold-trapped volatiles. The ProSPA instrument will then measure the nature and abundance of lunar volatiles using the gases released from the sample. ProSPA will also test specific processes which could be applied for resource extraction in the future.

Prospect is developed for ESA by a broad industrial team with Leonardo in Italy as prime contractor and technical lead of the ProSEED drill, together with the Open University in the UK as lead of the ProSPA instrument.

Prospect stands for Package for Resource Observation and In-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Characterisation and Testing.