NASA's next lunar rover is one step closer to starting its lunar journey.
The rolling robot, called VIPER („Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover”), is slated to launch to the moon later this year. It reached a milestone on that path.
„All of VIPER's flight instruments are installed and the rover is more than 80% built!” wrote Dan Andrews, VIPER project manager NASA Blog Wednesday (Feb. 28) post. „This is a great achievement and shows great progress by the dedicated VIPER team, who are excited to see the rover come together.”
Related: How NASA's VIPER rover could revolutionize lunar exploration with an AI mission
VIPER will land near the moon's south pole and search for water ice and other sources that could help NASA's future Artemis astronauts. Those lunar explorers included the first woman and first person of color to set foot on the lunar surface; They will do so on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently on target for 2026.
VIPER will spend 100 days orbiting the moon's south pole, collecting data that reveals where water ice is most likely to reside and determining how easy it is to access these resources.
In the process, VIPER will become the first resource mapping mission on another body in the Solar System. These evidence maps will be an important step in establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon.
Moon-orbiting satellite missions have previously collected data on water on the moon, but VIPER will get „up close and personal” with the moon's surface, scanning with its science instruments and probing the soil at its 3.3-foot (1 meter) depth. Drill. Some of the regions VIPER will explore are permanently shadowed craters, the coldest places in the Solar System. The bottoms of these craters are believed to have been undisturbed for billions of years.
During its mission, VIPER will be exposed to the extreme environment of the Moon and the incredibly cold temperatures of these permanently shadowed regions while having to traverse complex terrain.
Testing of VIPER systems is an important phase of the mission. Andrews explained that the team integrates and installs various subsystems on the rover as they perform „channelization” tests. These tests help the team ensure that pieces and parts such as cable harnesses and connectors between computers are working.
„Now, you might be thinking, 'Surely what we installed must work!' But it's important to remember how complex these space systems, and planetary rover systems in particular, are,” Andrews said. „Sometimes we'll do complex tests like send a command to the Near Infrared Volatility Spectrometer Subsystem (NIRVSS) instrument to take an image: Image taken? Is the view of the image correct? Image made? Is this the rover's avionics way to downlink?”
This „testing as we go” approach ensures that the NASA team doesn't discover problems that could affect VIPER later in its development, or worse, when it becomes inaccessible to the lunar surface.
„So we test as we go to minimize risk while doing full-rover environmental tests. This way, if the rover isn't working as expected after one of VIPER's environmental tests, we know it worked well once. That can help us quickly address what might have gone wrong.” Andrews concluded. „The pace at which we've been working through architecture and subsystem tests has been blistering lately, and we've had good successes.
„Go Viper!”
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