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NASA has been planning for years to send a robotic rover to the polar regions of the Moon. Water ice trapped at the bottom of craters could be a boon to future visiting astronauts, providing them with water to drink, air to breathe, and fuel to propel them to Earth or even further into the solar system.
Now, NASA has identified the crater that the rover – the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER – will spend about 100 days exploring when it arrives in a few years.
VIPER will land near the moon’s south pole, at the western end of the 45-mile-wide Nobile Crater, which formed when something hit the moon. Near the poles, the sun is low on the horizon and the crater bottoms, lying in permanent shadows, are among the coldest places in the solar system.
“The rover is going to get closer to the lunar soil, even while drilling several meters deep, which will totally help us redefine what we know about our moon,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, at a press conference. press conference call Monday.
Because VIPER is powered by solar panels, it can’t go far in the dark – its batteries will allow it to run in the dark for up to 50 hours – and it needs a direct light line with the Earth to communicate. The Nobile region, NASA officials said, is a favorable location because the terrain is varied but gentle enough for the rover to navigate.
VIPER is roughly the size of a golf cart – 5 feet long, 5 feet wide, and about 8 feet tall. Weighing around 1,000 pounds, it will carry a suite of instruments, including a drill that will allow it to take samples below the surface.
But NASA officials admit they don’t have definitive data showing there is a significant amount of water in the Nobile region. Whether there is water there or not, the results of the VIPER mission will compare what is measured from orbit and what is actually in the lunar soil.
“If we find that there is no water everywhere we look, that’s a fundamental finding,” said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, “and we’ll scratch our heads and rewrite to new textbooks. “
Water ice is an important resource for moon exploration, but its exact location and nature on the moon is not known. It can be on the surface as frost or buried underground. It can be pure water or minerals. VIPER’s mission is to figure this out, and this information will help plan Artemis, NASA’s program for returning astronauts to the moon.
Last year, NASA announced that it had awarded a contract to Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh to deliver VIPER to the moon at the end of 2023. The cost to build and operate VIPER is 433.5 million dollars, and NASA pays Astrobotic an additional $ 226 million to send it to the surface of the moon.
VIPER is one of a series of robotic missions that NASA is funding as part of its renewed interest in the moon. The first, CAPSTONE, could be launched from New Zealand into lunar orbit as early as next month in a small rocket built by the company Rocket Lab.
For VIPER and other missions set to land on the moon, NASA takes a page from its bestselling playbook after hiring private companies to transport cargo and later astronauts to the International Space Station. In the past, the space agency should have developed the VIPER landing system, but now depends on private companies like Astrobotic for this service.
An upcoming milestone for the Artemis program will be the launch of an Orion space capsule, designed to take astronauts from Earth to lunar orbit. This flight will have no one on board; it’s a test of Orion and NASA’s massive space launch system. NASA officials still say it could take off at the end of this year, but the schedule is expected to slide to 2022.
The first astronauts landing on the moon, with the help of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft, would take place during the third mission, still scheduled for 2024 but likely to be delayed.
The VIPER robotic rover is supposed to get there first.
And it may not be alone. Missions that will be launched by China and Russia, potentially in collaboration, also look to the lunar south pole to study water ice.
While the Soviet Union sent two rovers in the 1970s and China has sent two since 2013, including one in 2019 as part of the first mission to land on the far side of the moon, VIPER will be the first. NASA robotic lunar rover.
NASA actually has a small mission called the Lunar Trailblazer which involves creating global maps of lunar water from orbit. Bethany L. Ehlmann, the lead researcher for the mission, said it would be an eye in the sky to point VIPER to places where there was water, increasing the chances of success for the mission.
But Lunar Trailblazer is not expected to launch until 2025, along with another spacecraft. It will be a long time after VIPER has stopped working.
An earlier launch date would require a new ride for Trailblazer and increase the price of the mission.
During the press conference, Dr Glaze said there were no plans to bring the Lunar Trailblazer launch date forward, even though the spacecraft would be ready in early 2023, before VIPER headed out. towards the moon.
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