NASA’s four-wheeled rover won’t reach the moon after all, as development delays and mounting costs have apparently prompted the space agency to cancel its ice-hunting mission.
VIPERor Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was designed to find and study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. NASA had spent about $450 million on the development of its 1,000-pound roverwhich was originally scheduled to launch in late 2023. The launch date was first pushed back to 2024 and then to 2025 due to additional schedule and supply chain delays. The space agency has now decided to cancel the mission altogether because it threatens to disrupt other commercial payload missions to the moon, NASA said. announcement Wednesday.
VIPER was supposed to launch with Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, which was supposed to deliver the rover to the moon as part of a $322 million order from Commercial Lunar Payload Services. The Griffin mission itself has been delayed until September 2025. Still, NASA says it remains committed to exploring the lunar surface with the help of its commercial partners.
“The agency plans to conduct a series of missions to search for ice and other resources on the Moon over the next five years,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “Our approach will be to maximize the technology and work that went into VIPER, while preserving critical funding to support our robust lunar portfolio.”
NASA will disassemble the VIPER rover and reuse its parts for future missions to the Moon. But before disassembling the robot, the space agency will first consider proposals from commercial and international partners who may be interested in using VIPER.
Before its cancellation, NASA had described VIPER as the most capable robot it would send to the lunar surface, and the mission was an integral part of NASA’s future plans to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon. VIPER was designed to explore the permanently shadowed areas of the lunar south pole for pockets of water ice, which could be used by future astronauts under NASA’s Artemis program.
The mission could have informed landing sites for future Artemis missions, but NASA says it will “pursue alternative methods to achieve many of VIPER’s objectives and verify the presence of ice at the lunar south pole.” The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), a NASA payload scheduled to land in late 2024, will search for water ice using a drill and a mass spectrometer to measure the volatile content of subsurface materials.
