![]() VIPER builds on the Resource Prospector mission, which NASA canceled in 2018 as the agency pivoted to a commercial approach for robotic lunar exploration. NASA announced the VIPER mission in 2019. The 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) rover will go into hibernation when the wobble of the Moon’s rotation causes the south pole to shift out of view of Earth for two weeks, cutting the direct communications link. The rover will take daring trips into the eternally dark craters, relying on battery power for up to 50 hours during each traverse that moves VIPER beyond the rays of the Sun, always near the horizon at the lunar poles. “We do real-time science,” Colaprete said. That means scientists can control VIPER more like a drone. It takes a radio signal between 5 to 20 minutes to travel at the speed of light between Earth and the red planet, but just a few seconds to make the trip to the Moon. VIPER will also be operated differently than NASA’s Mars rovers. The LED headlights will cast a blue tint on the Moon’s charcoal-colored landscape. “Because it goes into dark places, it is the first rover with headlights,” Colaprete said Tuesday in a presentation at the NASA Exploration Science Forum. Scientists have detected evidence that those cold, shadowed crater floors harbor water ice at or near the surface, where it could be harvested by astronauts. VIPER is designed to drive into dark craters, places where sunlight hasn’t reached for billions of years. The four-wheel rover looks different compared to NASA’s nuclear-powered robots exploring Mars. ![]() In June, the space agency formally approved VIPER’s team to move into full-scale assembly and testing ahead of the rover’s scheduled launch in November 2024. “A large group of people have been working on this idea for 10-plus years,” said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission.Įarlier this year, engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston started building the rover’s chassis. ![]() NASA is now assembling a golf cart-size rover to drive into the dark polar craters to search for ice deposits that could be used by future astronauts to make their own rocket propellant and breathable air. The search for ice at the Moon’s poles has loomed large in the field of lunar science since an instrument on an Indian satellite discovered water molecules inside shadowed crater floors more than a decade ago. NASA/Daniel Rutter reader comments 59 with
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