While space exploration has been focused on getting to Mars recently, NASA hasn’t forgot about the Moon and is sending a rover there in 2023. Now the space agency has announced where it intends to land the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER).
Picking a landing site is quite tricky as it needs to fulfill four key criteria. The rover requires a site that has plenty of sunlight for solar power generation, good visibility with Earth for communication, terrain VIPER can easily navigate, and data suggesting there’s potentially lots of resources for the rover to analyze. That location turns out to be the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the Moon’s South Pole, an area measuring around 36 square miles.
Although the landing site is ideal in terms of meeting the four criteria, it’s also “one of the coldest areas in our solar system,” which certainly poses a challenge for NASA’s scientists and engineers. “Selecting a landing site for VIPER is an exciting and important decision for all of us,” Daniel Andrews, VIPER project manager, said. “Years of study have gone into evaluating the polar region VIPER will explore. VIPER is going into uncharted territory—informed by science—to test hypotheses and reveal critical information for future human space exploration.”
VIPER will be transported to the Moon on a SpaceX Falcon-Heavy rocket and delivered to the Moon’s surface using Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Hopefully it will have easy access to ice deposits and “other resources” if the data NASA collected turns out to be accurate.
If you’d like to know more about the mission, NASA is holding a Reddit Ask Me Anything session today at 4pm ET in the Space subreddit.
