VIPER will also travel over challenging surface textures and obstacles, a potential disturbance for all its sensitive scientific equipment. VIPER will have to survive temperatures that reach 500 degrees Fahrenheit higher in the sunlight. Parts of the poles are perpetually shadowed, making them the moon’s coldest spots temperatures can dip below minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. To carry out this mission, the rover will carry several scientific instruments, including a regolith and ice drill and multiple spectrometers that can detect hydrogen atoms from water. VIPER will help scientists determine how polar water is distributed and whether or not it could be used by future crewed explorations. This eight-foot-tall rover will spend 100 Earth days exploring the moon’s South Pole in 2024 in order to study the water found under the lunar surface. VIPER is a rover with the ability to rotate and lift its wheels independently to escape from soft soils and move in all directions.Ī key component of NASA’s Artemis program is the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, better known as VIPER. This golf-cart-sized rover will seek out underground ice With more than a dozen rover missions planned for the next three years, we sifted through the projects and polled experts to share with you details about five of the most compelling. Some rovers will mark the first attempts of their respective countries to explore the moon. Many of the missions will focus on the lunar soil, or regolith. “The environment on the moon is very different depending on where you go,” he adds. Each rover has unique abilities to match the disparate challenges it will face at its lunar destination. Terry Fong, a roboticist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, says lunar rovers in this new wave vary substantially both in size and in technical capabilities, in part because they are each exploring a different part of the satellite. The Chinese rover Yutu landed in 2013, followed by Yutu-2 in 2019, which is still on the moon today. In the early 1970s, both the United States and the Soviet Union sent rovers to the moon, but since then, only two new rovers have successfully explored the lunar surface. But before any astronauts set foot on the moon, a multinational array of robots will be taking their first steps-or first rolls-across the lunar soil. Through its Artemis program, NASA plans to send humans to the moon for the first time in five decades, setting the groundwork for the construction of a permanent lunar base camp. ![]() Over the next couple years, new rovers will explore more of the moon’s surface than ever before.
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