A Hungarian space technology company, “Puli Space Technologies” has won second place in NASA’s competition entitled “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload” – the company writes in a statement sent to Telex.
The results of the first round were announced in the summer of 2020, and the Hungarian company won the grand prize at the time with their “Puli” Lunar Water Snooper. In the category of instruments capable of exploring lunar resources, only the Water Sniffer reached the implementation phase: in 2021, NASA supported the project with 225 000 USD.
The company further says that they were able to design and manufacture a device ready for deployment within a year, and have already provided three of them to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for testing purposes.
The “Puli Lunar Water Snooper” is a very small (10x10x3,4 cm) detector weighing barely 40 dekagrams, and is capable of finding hydrogen supplies on the surface layer of the Moon. This could be useful in providing water for the astronauts, as well as in fuel production.
The company is currently awaiting NASA’s approval for the Puli Lunar Water Sniffer to be included in its next mission.
“We are proud of what we have achieved so far. (...) At the same time, technical discussions are underway about participating in another mission, where the goal would be to reach the South Pole of the Moon within a year, and carry out measurements in the so-called “permanently shaded area”, in a temperature of -200 degrees”
– Dr. Tibor Pacher, founder and leader of Puli Space Technologies said.
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The translation of this article was made possible by our cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation.