Photo: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas
After spending years and a small fortune developing America's first robotic rover to explore the Moon and hunt for water, the U.S. space agency NASA announced in July that it was abandoning the project. The plan at the time was to disassemble the rover and sell its parts to interested parties, but someone at NASA seems to have had a better idea in the meantime.
The rover is called the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) and was designed to search for water in any form on the surface of Earth's satellite, in light of the upcoming human missions there. Work on the final assembly of the rover began in 2023 after several years of planning and the amount of money spent on it had risen to about $450 million at the time of cancellation.
The reasons for the cancellation were related to undisclosed issues “delays in planning and supply chain”, This would have entailed increased costs, but would also have interfered with other missions planned under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, of which VIPER was a part.
The four-wheeled rover is pretty big, measuring 5 feet by 8 feet (1.5 meters by 1.5 meters by 2.5 meters) and weighing 992 pounds (450 kilograms). The thing is powered by solar panels that charge a 450-watt battery.
It features an 8-foot (2.5-meter) mast to support a pair of stereo navigation cameras and a pair of antennas, beacons to illuminate the path ahead (a first for an exploratory rover), and four main instruments to help it do its job.
The first instrument is the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), which was to be used to detect the presence of water in the soil. The second, the Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrains (TRIDENT), is the instrument that was to be used to excavate the soil cuttings.
Photo: NASA
Third on the list is the Near-Infrared Volatiles Spectrometer System (NIRVSS), an instrument designed to analyze the samples. Last but not least, the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo), which would be used to evaluate gases in the environment.
When NASA announced it was shutting down the project, it implied that there was no chance VIPER would ever fly to the Moon in its entirety. That's why the agency announced it would remove the instruments from the rover and send them, along with copies of them, to the Moon on separate missions. Separately, industry players were asked to express interest in using the rover's components.
Now the plan seems to have changed a bit, provided someone in the private space exploration sector is willing to take on the project.
The space agency announced last week that it had issued a request for information seeking “interest from American companies and institutions in conducting a mission using the agency's VIPER lunar rover.”
The announcement came after NASA accepted expressions of interest in using VIPER as is, and decided to look into the matter further. The main item on the agenda will be ensuring minimal or no cost to the government.
The Request for Information is only for companies based in the United States, but the agency is also reportedly looking for a potential overseas partner to offload the VIPER to, through separate channels. There does not appear to be a deadline for when to find a partner.
Photo: NASA
As for the rest of the hardware components initially involved in the VIPER mission, they are all still under development.
VIPER was to be launched by the private space company Astrobotic using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Delivery to the Moon would be made using an Astrobotic lander called Griffin.
Griffin’s slow development was part of VIPER’s delay problems, and the main reason why the 2023 launch date was skipped. Left without a reason to exist, the lander will still be launched to the Moon at a yet-to-be-determined date later this year, on a mission dedicated solely to testing the lander and its engines.
As for NASA’s CLPS program, it’s full steam ahead. So far, only two missions have been launched under the program (the failed Peregrine lander developed by Astrobotic itself and the successful Nova-C lander demonstrated by Intuitive Machines), but six more are planned by 2026.
The next CLPS mission is Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, scheduled for launch later this year. Astrobotic will launch the aforementioned Griffin by the end of 2024, and Intuitive Machines will attempt to repeat its previous successful mission with another Nova-C.
Another Nova-C is scheduled for launch in 2025, followed a year later by Draper Laboratory's Apex 1.0 and a second Blue Ghost. All remaining CLPS missions will be sent to the Moon using rockets provided by SpaceX.