VIPER Archives

August 12, 2024August 12, 2024 by Mark Thompson

NASA is Looking for a Commercial Partner to Save VIPER

NASA VIPER rover in clean room — NASA’s VIPER rover sits assembled inside the clean room at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. (Credit: NASA)

Space exploration has led the world in that wonderful human ability to co-operate, alas history shows we don’t do it quite as much as we should! Recently NASA has put a request out to the wider community for ideas for their VIPER rover which was designed for lunar exploration. The exact purpose of VIPER was to hunt for volatile minerals in the polar regions of the Moon. The big question, will NASA get any takers?

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by Alan Boyle

NASA Stops Work on VIPER Moon Rover, Citing Cost and Schedule Issues

NASA says it intends to discontinue development of its VIPER moon rover, due to cost increases and schedule delays — but the agency is also pointing to other opportunities for robotic exploration of the lunar south polar region.

October 29, 2019October 29, 2019 by Matt Williams

NASA is Testing a Rover That Could Search For Water Ice on The Moon

In the coming years, NASA will be sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission took place in 1972. Back in May, NASA announced that the plan – which is officially known as Project Artemis – was being expedited and would take place in the next five years. In accordance with the new timeline, Artemis will involve sending the first woman and next man to the Moon’s southern polar region by 2024.

To this end, NASA is working on a lunar rover that will search for and map out water deposits in the Moon’s southern polar region. It’s known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) and it is scheduled to be delivered to the lunar surface by 2022. This mission will gather data that will help inform future missions to the South Pole-Aitken Basin and the eventual construction of a base there.