To the astonishment of the lunar medical community, on July 17, NASA canceled the long-awaited mission of the Volatile Research Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), which was searching for water ice on the Moon, a must-have resource for long-term explorers. term.
VIPER was one of the highest-profile projects in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which sends robot projects to the Moon to help long-term Artemis crews. Artemis is aiming for a landing near the lunar south pole, where the Sun’s shallow angle means many craters lie in permanent shadow. Scientists know that those craters contain water ice, which could be used as drinking water for astronauts and as a resource for the production of rocket fuel and power. But we don’t know. We don’t know how much ice there is, or how easily it will be imaginable to extract it. The VIPER project aimed to answer those questions, and its cancellation deprives the Artemis program of critical data.
Equally impactful for the clinical network is that $450 million has already been spent to design and build VIPER and its suite of instruments. The finished VIPER only needed to pass its environmental tests to ensure it could be in the incredibly harsh and perpetually shadowed polar regions of the Moon. The Astrobiotics Griffin rover and the lunar lander that was supposed to launch VIPER near the South Pole were scheduled to launch in September 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
NASA has said it is willing to hand over VIPER to another organization to take it to the moon, as long as it doesn’t involve any additional cost to NASA. If no interested party emerges, existing plans call for dismantling the VIPER and cannibalizing its tools for imaginable use in long-term missions.
NASA’s explanation for VIPER’s cancellation is that COVID-induced source chain issues with the rover and its Griffin lander drove up the mission’s prices and delayed its planned launch for two years. By canceling the project, after spending about $1 billion, NASA says it will save $84 million. At the same time, NASA will pay $323 million to Astrobiotics to complete the Griffin lander and take it to the Moon without VIPER. Currently, plans call for landing a “mass simulator,” or dead weight, that will take any clinical knowledge to the Moon.
An even deeper fear is that VIPER’s cancellation may also be just the tip of the iceberg for NASA’s ambitious, yet chronically underfunded, lunar exploration programs. The disappearance of VIPER is a clue that more bad news may be awaiting us, not only with the CLPS robot programs, but also with the return of the Artemis team to the Moon. Landing a deadweight Griffin lander that has no lunar science will not solve NASA’s investment problems.
In addition to the large amount of data on ice and volatiles that may not be collected, the cancellation is a major public relations blow for NASA at a time when the company needs public support. VIPER may not have gotten the same spotlight as flagship missions like Mars Sample Return or the James Webb Space Telescope, but videos of the rover deftly maneuvering around testing ranges continued to circulate in the news even several days after the announced cancellation. of the mission. program.
If VIPER ever had a chance to complete its mission, it would need a set of features designed for exploring icy, gloomy polar craters. With a square area of five feet (1. 5 meters) and a h8 of 8 feet (2. 4 m). , the vehicle would have been the first on the Moon equipped with headlights to operate at night. VIPER also features a cutting-edge wheel design, with independent guidance and active 4-wheel suspension. This would allow the rover to traverse ground situations on the Moon, ranging from compact, beach-like sand to soft, fluffy dust that would block a more traditional rover. To traverse comfortable flooring, the VIPER’s wheels can be independently lifted and swept back and forth, propelling the VIPER forward in a swimming motion.
VIPER’s main goals were to study the ice and volatiles in permanently shadowed polar craters so that scientists could assess their usefulness for future equipment. In addition to identifying useful volatiles such as hydrogen, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, VIPER looks for volatiles that may be detrimental to Artemis missions. To do this, VIPER would have used a set of spectrometers and a drill capable of penetrating the surface at an intensity of 40 inches (1. 0 m) to extract underground samples for analysis.
The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Territory (TRIDENT), developed through Honeybee Robotics, is a carbide-tipped hammer drill with a temperature sensor at its tip. The drill would extract the chips that would be deposited in a conduit for research. through 3 spectrometers: the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), the Near-Infrared Volatile Substances Spectrometer System (NIRVSS), and the Lunar Observation Mass Spectrometer (MSolo). Scientists suspect ice lurks on the Moon
Plans for the mission called for VIPER to operate for one hundred days on the lunar surface. Controlled through a driving force on Earth, the rover would be tasked with moving in 15-foot (4. 6 m) increments between scientific or consistent conditions. The rover would typically have traversed terrain with an inclination of up to 15 degrees, but could have maneuvered with an inclination of 30 degrees if necessary. VIPER’s top speed would have been 0. 73 km/h (0. 45 mph), or approximately 23 centimeters (9 inches) per minute. This breakneck speed would slow to 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) depending on the timing during scientific tests in which spectrometers scanned the surface for potential ice targets for the TRIDENT drill.
The natural release of the Moon, or its monthly cyclical motions and wobbles observed from Earth, would periodically put the rover out of contact with the project’s controllers. Plans for the mission’s realization called for planned two-week crossings to explore the water, and the rover would arrive at a predetermined location while waiting for line-of-sight communications with Earth to be restored. As the Sun never rises more than 10° above the horizon at VIPER’s landing site, the rover will need to be carefully placed to ensure that sunlight can reach its solar panels to recharge its batteries. Batteries; VIPER can only enjoy 50 hours of continuous darkness.
As exciting as the expected knowledge about the VIPER lunar ice would have been, for now, all is not lost. The Polar Resources and Ice Minning Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) project is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon nine in the A later this year and will also search for ice in the polar regions. PRIME-1 will bring the same copies of the TRIDENT lunar drill and the MSolo spectrometer that were to work on VIPER. However, those tools will remain connected to the PRIME-1 lander and will not explore giant spaces as planned with the VIPER rover, which will especially reduce its clinical production.
Why log in? Subscribers can publish their virtual magazines and registered users can participate in the forums and galleries of our network.