With NASA’s Artemis mission planning to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, there’s a new buzz about lunar exploration.

Space agencies around the world are developing cutting-edge moon rovers with advanced capabilities, with NASA’s VIPER rover among the vanguard of new robotic explorers.

VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, has now begun construction and is scheduled to land at the moon’s South Pole in 2024. Its mission is to search the lunar surface for water ice. Armed with a suite of scientific instruments, VIPER will collect and analyze samples and map the distribution of water ice beneath the surface – which could lay the foundation for sustained lunar exploration.

“VIPER follows on the heels of NASA’s (2009) LCROSS mission, which was the first lunar mission to actually touch the water ice in a polar region on the moon,” says Dan Andrews, the VIPER project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

“Ever since that discovery, missions have been planned to better understand the nature and distribution of the water ice, supporting both scientific and exploration goals, like Artemis’ goal of sustaining a human presence on the moon,” he continues.

“Harvesting local resources wherever they can be found, will facilitate humans ‘living off the land’ on the moon, as well as enabling air to breath, water to drink, grow and manufacture, and even hydrogen for rocket fuel.”

A well-adapted rover

VIPER will be around the size of a golf cart and will weigh 430 kg (948 lbs). It will be equipped with three spectrometers to measure volatiles – substances such as water that can easily change from solid or liquid to gas – and a 1-meter drill to perform sub-surface excavations.

“The spectrometers include a mass spec, a neutron spec, and a near-infrared spec, providing a good, broad understanding of the volatiles of interest, as well as some geotechnical properties understanding of the lunar regolith,” he says. Regolith is the loose material on the lunar surface, including moon rocks and dust.

NASA hopes that the data collected by VIPER will help to shape future missions. “Knowing where resources like water-ice are located … as well as the conditions at those locations, will carry direct implications for how follow-on missions will go about harvesting that water-ice,” says Andrews. “Additionally, learning for how volatiles could be extracted could carry relevance to equivalent activities on Mars – Mars and the moon are very different places but there is some good engineering learning from the moon that can inform future Mars volatiles harvesting missions.”

In terms of its design and capabilities, VIPER stands out from other rovers due to its adaptation to lunar polar conditions.

One of the major obstacles facing the VIPER team is the lighting at the moon’s poles, according to Andrews. “For a solar-powered mission, sunlight is power and warmth, and in polar regions, the sun is very low on the horizon and the shadows on the lunar surface are very long,” he explains. “This forces surface roving missions to plan very carefully so they do not freeze, given those cold, dark shadows. The VIPER design team is taking all of those constraints and designing them into both our surface traverse plans and into the rover design itself.

“For example, our solar arrays are on the sides of the rover – not the top – because the sun is so low on the horizon.”

As a four-wheeled rover, VIPER will be able to move in any direction, while keeping its solar arrays and communications systems pointed to the Earth or sun. “This gives VIPER incredible levels of control and flexibility,” Andrews says. “VIPER’s suspension system also provides unique means for changing its center of gravity, so that it can navigate uncertain conditions and environments.”

Rovers, rovers everywhere

The VIPER mission is not alone in its plans to put wheels on the moon.

Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) is developing a new rover to replace the 10kg, four-wheel Rashid Rover that was lost in April when the lander carrying the rover – the Hakuto-R spacecraft, built by Japanese company ispace – is thought to have crash landed on the moon.

India’s third rover, Chandrayaan-3, is set to launch in July this year and will be deployed at a “soft site” on the moon’s surface to carry out chemical analysis.

At Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, engineers are looking to ultimately build a team of tiny rovers that will work together to gather data on the moon. The Laboratory for Space Instrumentation at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México has a similar project – its Colmena plans to catapult five miniature rovers onto the lunar surface. In Canada, Toronto-based start-up STELLS SPACE is developing a “portable charger” rover to wirelessly provide solar energy to stranded rovers.

In the meantime, the impact of the VIPER mission on space research promises to be significant.

“VIPER will provide answers – and probably new questions – which could very well shape the future of commercial industry on the moon for generations to come,” says Andrews.

Quelle: CNN

----

Update: 27.12.2023

.

How NASA's VIPER rover could revolutionize moon exploration with AI mission

Into the Belly of the Rover: VIPER’s Final Science Instrument Installed

A team of engineers prepares to integrate TRIDENT – short for The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain – into the belly of NASA’s first robotic Moon rover, VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover). 

TRIDENT, designed and developed by engineers at Honeybee Robotics in Altadena, California, is the fourth and final science instrument to be installed into VIPER. NASA engineers have already successfully integrated VIPER’s three other science instruments into the rover. These include: the MSOLO (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations), NIRVSS (Near-Infrared Volatiles Spectrometer System), and NSS (Neutron Spectrometer System). 

Shortly after TRIDENT was integrated in the clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the team also successfully tested its ability to power on, release the locks that hold the drill in place during launch, extend to its full depth of more than three feet (one meter), perform percussive drilling, and return to its stowed position inside the rover.

TRIDENT will dig up soil from below the lunar surface using a rotary percussive drill – meaning it both spins to cut into the ground and hammers to fragment hard material for more energy-efficient drilling. In addition to being able to measure the strength and compactedness of the lunar soil, the drill also carries a temperature sensor to take readings below the surface. VIPER will launch to the Moon aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. It will reach its destination at Mons Mouton near the Moon’s South Pole. Scientists will work with these four instruments to better understand the origin of water and other resources on the Moon, which could support human exploration as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign.

Quelle: NASA

----

Update: 5.03.2024

.

NASA's ice-hunting VIPER moon rover getting ready to slither to the launch pad

 

"All of VIPER’s flight instruments are installed, and the rover is more than 80% built!"

Artist's illustration of NASA's ice-hunting VIPER rover exploring the moon. (Image credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

NASA's next moon rover is one step closer to starting its lunar mission.  

The rolling robot, known as VIPER ("Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover"), is set to launch toward the moon later this year. And it just notched a milestone along that path.

"All of VIPER’s flight instruments are installed, and the rover is more than 80% built!"  VIPER Project Manager Dan Andrews wrote in a NASA blog post on Wednesday (Feb. 28). "This is a major accomplishment and shows the great progress being made by the dedicated VIPER team, who are excited to see the rover coming together."

VIPER will land near the lunar south pole and search for water ice and other resources that could help support NASA's future Artemis astronauts. Those moon explorers will include the first woman and the first person of color to set foot on the lunar surface; they'll do so on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently targeted for 2026.

VIPER will spend 100 days roaming the lunar south pole region, collecting data that will reveal where water ice is most likely to dwell and determining how easy these resources will be to access. 

In the process, VIPER will become the first-ever resource mapping mission on another body in the solar system. These resource maps will be a vital step in establishing a long-term human presence on the moon. 

Moon-orbiting satellite missions have collected data regarding water on the moon before, but VIPER will get "up close and personal" with the lunar surface, scanning with its scientific tools and investigating soil at varying depths with its 3.3-foot (1 meter) drill. Some of the regions VIPER will explore are permanently shadowed craters that are some of the coldest places in the solar system. It is believed that the bottoms of these craters harbor ice that has been undisturbed for billions of years.

As it conducts its mission, VIPER will be exposed to the extreme environment of the moon and the incredibly cold temperatures of these permanently shadowed areas while having to overcome complex terrain.

Testing of VIPER's systems is a crucial stage for the mission. Andrews explained that, as the team assembles and installs various subsystems onto the rover, they perform "channelization" tests. These trials enable the team to confirm that pieces and parts like cable harnesses and connectors between systems are working. 

"Now, you might think, 'Of course what we installed should work!' But it’s important to remember how complicated these space systems, and planetary rover systems in particular, are," Andrews said. "Sometimes we will perform even more complex tests, like sending a command to the Near Infrared Volatile Spectrometer Subsystem (NIRVSS) instrument to take an image: Is the image taken successful? Is the field of view of the image correct? Did the image make its way into the rover’s avionics for downlink?"

This "test as we go" approach ensures that the NASA team doesn't discover issues that could impact VIPER later in its development or, even worse, when it is unreachable on the lunar surface. 

"So we test as we go to decrease risk later when we’re performing whole-rover environmental tests. This way, if the rover doesn’t work as expected after one of VIPER’s environmental tests, we know it once worked fine, and that can help us more quickly problem-solve what might have gone wrong," Andrews concluded. "The pace in which we’ve been working through the build and subsystem checkouts has been blistering lately, and we’ve had a good run of successes.
"Go VIPER!"

Quelle: SC

----

Update: 3.04.2024

.

NASA VIPER Robotic Moon Rover Team Raises Its Mighty Mast

A team of engineers lifts the mast into place atop of NASA’s VIPER robotic Moon rover in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

NASA’s VIPER – short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover – now stands taller and more capable than ever. And that’s thanks to its mast.

VIPER’s mast, and the suite of instruments affixed to it, looks a lot like the rover’s “neck” and “head.” The mast instruments are designed to help the team of rover drivers and real-time scientists send commands and receive data while the rover navigates around hazardous crater slopes, boulders, and places that risk communications blackouts. The team will use these instruments, along with four science payloads, to scout the lunar South Pole. During its approximately 100-day mission, VIPER seeks to better understand the origin of water and other resources on the Moon, as well as the extreme environment where NASA plans to send astronauts as part of the Artemis campaign.

The tip of VIPER’s mast stands approximately eight feet (2.5 meters) above its wheel rims and is equipped with a pair of stereo navigation cameras, a pair of powerful LED headlights, as well as a low- and high-gain antenna to transmit data to and receive data from the Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas on Earth.

The stereo navigation cameras – the “eyes” of the rover – are mounted to a part of the mast that gimbals, allowing the team to pan them as much as 400 degrees around and tilt them up and down as much as 75 degrees. The VIPER team will use the navigation cameras to take sweeping panoramas of the rover’s surroundings and images to detect and further study surface features such as rocks and craters as small as four inches (10 cm) in diameter – or about the length of a pencil – from as far as 50 feet (15 meters) away. And because the navigation cameras are mounted up high, it gives the VIPER team a near human-like perspective as the rover explores areas of scientific interest around the Moon’s South Pole.

Due to the extremes of light and darkness found on the Moon, VIPER will be the first planetary rover to have headlights. The headlights will cast a narrow, long-distance beam – much like a car’s high beams – to help the team reveal obstacles or interesting terrain features that would otherwise stay hidden in the shadows. Positioned next to the rover’s two navigation cameras, the lights feature arrays of blue LEDs that the rover navigation team determined would provide the best visibility given the challenging lighting conditions on the Moon. 

In order to transmit large amounts of data across the 240,000 miles (384,000 km) that separate Earth and the Moon, VIPER has a gimballing precision-pointed, high-gain antenna that will send information along a very focused, narrow beam. Its low-gain antenna also will send data but using radio waves at a much lower data rate. The ability for the antennas to maintain the correct orientation, even while driving, serves a critical function: without it, the rover cannot receive commands while in motion on the Moon and cannot transmit any of its data back to Earth for scientists to achieve their mission goals. All that data is then transferred from the DSN to the Multi-Mission Operations and Control Center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, where rover operations are based.

NASA’s VIPER robotic Moon rover stands taller than ever after engineers integrated its mast in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Prior to installation on the rover, engineers put the mast through a variety of testing. This included time in a thermal vacuum chamber to verify the white coating surrounding the mast insulates as intended. After the mast’s integration in the clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the team also successfully performed check-outs of its components and for the first time sent data through the rover using its antennas.

VIPER is part of the Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program and is managed by the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. VIPER will launch to the Moon aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. It will reach its destination at Mons Mouton near the Moon’s South Pole.

Quelle: NASA