As part of the agency’s plan to sent the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, NASA is looking to collect some dirt. Today, the agency confirmed that it will pay private companies to “collect a small amount of Moon ‘dirt’ or rocks from the lunar surface.”
NASA put out a call to the open asking companies to submit their proposals and say’s it’s open to working with companies outside of the US. NASA will require that the images as proof of the collection and collected materials, plus location data. The collected material will solely become NASA’s property, and the agency is hoping to secure the sample by 2024.
“We are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a blog post.
The agency has a dozen other projects in the works that will help it prepare for a 2024 Moon mission. It’s also working with the European Space Agency to bring soil samples from Mars back to Earth, and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team is going for the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. As a meteorite recently spotted in Antarctica just proved, even a small amount of space rock can lead to big discoveries.
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