NASA is sending a rover where no man or robot has gone before.
As of recent, mining lunar water ice has been all the talk for enabling deep space exploration and establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon. We’ve known from decades of study that the Moon has water, but where and how much has been the question.
Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research center will announce the landing site of the Artemis program’s first robotic rover, VIPER. The rover will explore the lunar south pole in search of resources for crewed missions.
The Perseverance Mars rover isn’t the only new rover in NASA’s collection of robots that will explore celestial bodies in space. The slightly more aggressively named VIPER rover will be Moon-bound in 2023.
Today NASA unveiled which company has been awarded the contract to transport VIPER to the Moon using a lunar landing system: Astrobotic. The company will receive $199.5 million for the service.
