NASA is postponing the flight of its VIPER rover – a specialized robot designed to search for water on the lunar surface. Originally scheduled to begin its lunar journey in November 2023, VIPER is targeting its launch in November 2024 in order to allow testing of the probe that will take the rover to the lunar surface, according to the agency. NASA.
VIPER, which represents volatile vehicles investigating polar exploration, is a large component of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon.
The robotic rover is essentially a prospector, equipped with specialized agile wheels and scientific and drilling tools, the VIPER is designed to search for water ice believed to be on the moon in order to determine how much water is there, how widespread the water is, and what kind of water the water looks like. This way, if future missions wanted to extract the moon’s water, they would have a better idea of where to look and what tools they would need.
VIPER is targeting a November 2024 launch. To get VIPER to the moon, NASA is contracting a commercial company called Astrobotic through the space agency’s CLPS program — an initiative to incentivize private companies to build commercial lunar landing platforms, according to The Verge.
Astrobots, which is working on a fleet of robotic lunar landers, plans to use the future Griffin probe to transport VIPER to the lunar surface.
But NASA announced that it has ordered additional testing of the Griffin spacecraft, pushing the expected launch date to late 2024. With this change, NASA is awarding Astrobotic an additional $67.8 million, bringing the total value of the company’s contract for VIPER significant to $320.4 million. .
Despite the probe’s delay, NASA plans to transport copies of the VIPER instruments on two upcoming commercial vehicles bound for the moon later this year.
The probes include one developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, as well as a smaller lander called Peregrine being developed by Astrobotic.