Hungarian instrument could find water on the Moon soon

After the great race for getting to the Moon during the Cold War, it is now a goal for many nations again. The destination this time is the South Pole of the Moon. At this location, some craters are in constant shadow. Therefore, there is a possibility that they are filled with frozen water. The second race for the Moon has already started, and it seems that a Hungarian instrument could be important.

Puli Lunar Water Snooper

As Telex reported, the Hungarian Puli Lunar Water Snooper won second place in NASA’s “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload, The Sequel” competition last May. Puli Space Technologies‘ water snooper was the only one to make it to the implementation phase of the category for lunar resource exploration. The key to their success is that they were able to design, manufacture, and deliver three working prototypes to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for testing within a year. The water snooper is a quite small structure, measuring 10x10x3.4 cm and roughly 0.4 kilogramm. However, it is capable of measuring the hydrogen reservoir hiding in the surface layer of the Moon.

This could provide water for the astronauts. In addition, the hydrogen and oxygen extracted from the water could be used as rocket fuel. NASA provided over USD 290,000 for Puli Space Technologies, which is not as much as it may sound. Thus, they had to seek help from other companies as well, such as Intuitive Machines. Tibor Pacher, the founder of Puli Space Technologies, said:

We were talking to two colleagues at Intuitive Machines when Trent Martin, the company’s vice president of lunar systems, came into the meeting room and asked us what we were doing. He was interested in the project, and he asked us to leave the Water Snooper there, but we could not because we were taking it to NASA. We finally agreed to build two more for them, and they agreed to take them to the moon in return.

Moon mission

The Water Snooper will go to the Moon on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, scheduled for the first half of 2024. The company has won several NASA projects, taking 3 “seats” of the 8 for commercial lunar cargo service. IM-2 could be the first in many things, such as operating the first cellular network on the Moon. According to Trent Martin, a small device called a hopper will accompany the Hungarian invention.

The Noca-C lander reaches the lunar surface, the hopper will dock, making five hops, including to a permanently shadowed area of the Moon’s South Pole. The main goal is to take as many measurements and gather as much information as possible about the surface, the temperature and the water/ice. The hopper is an international project. Alongside the Hungarian Puli and the University of Arizona, the German space agency’s Berlin Institute for Planetary Research is also working on discovering the Moon together.