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Delays and considerations about NASA’s long-term budgets doomed the VIPER mission, which aimed to search for ice near the moon’s south pole, to failure.
By Kenneth Chang
Kenneth Chang reported on the ups and downs of NASA’s lunar missions.
NASA will spend about $800 million to send a rover to the moon.
The rover, known as the Volatile Research Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, is already built. The launch is still scheduled for next year, but VIPER will not be on board.
The area company announced Wednesday that it plans to cancel the project and plans to dismantle VIPER, a wheeled vehicle the size of a small car, which will search for water ice in the shade near the moon’s south pole. A “non-functional “mass” simulator will take its place.
The goal of the reconnaissance was to give a glimpse of what lies beneath the dark craters of the polar regions before NASA astronauts land there in the coming years. However, delays with the VIPER rover and the privately built spacecraft that was due to land the rover on the moon’s surface led to uncertainty about the mission’s schedule. The increase in prices can simply decrease or cancel other missions.
“Decisions like we’ve been discussing today are extremely difficult to make,” Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference. “We don’t make them lightly. We put a lot of thought into the best way to move forward.”
The proposed cancellation of VIPER is the latest setback in NASA’s clinical efforts.
Prices for a project to collect rocks and soil from Mars and bring them back to Earth for examination skyrocketed, prompting NASA to request new, less expensive concepts to accomplish this task. The Europa Clipper, a robot project to examine a moon of Jupiter with an ocean under ice, may be delayed due to failures in some of its electronics.
NASA missions end up costing more and lasting longer than expected, and the company rarely continues forward, delaying other missions. But with NASA unlikely to get significant budget increases from Congress in the coming years, officials at the firm decided it would be most productive to cut their losses on VIPER.
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