(BCN) -- NASA's first robotic lunar rover, which will traverse and map the moon to locate water and other resources on its surface and subsurface, finally has a landing site, the agency announced on Monday.
The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land near the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the moon's south pole in late 2023.
"It's going to be something that is truly out of this world," Anthony Colaprete, VIPER lead project scientist at NASA, said on Monday.
The goal of the mission is to be able to confirm whether there is water on the moon and answer these questions: how frozen water and other resources arrived on the Moon in the first place, where they came from, how they remained preserved for billions of years, how they can escape, and where they go.
"If resources are plentiful and accessible this could really change the nature of sustaining humans there, and also help us understand the nature in which to retrieve those resources," Colaprete said.
The mission also allows scientists to better understand the moon's cosmic origin, its evolution and its history. And if successful, it will result in the first resource mapping mission on the surface of another celestial body. And speaking of firsts - VIPER will be the first to explore the moon's south pole - one of the coldest areas in the solar system. In previous missions, scientists only studied the region using remote sensing instruments, including those on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
However, those instruments revealed that the moon likely has water or ice, specifically at its south pole - which is the primary reason the Nobile Crater was selected as the landing site.
"VIPER is going into uncharted territory--informed by science--to test hypotheses and reveal critical information for future human space exploration," Daniel Andrews, VIPER project manager, said. "Years of study have gone into evaluating the polar region VIPER will explore."
The Nobile Crater is an impact crater that was formed through a collision with another smaller celestial body and is almost permanently covered in shadows, "which means it's cold enough for ice to exist," said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters.
It also has many smaller and more accessible craters near Nobile's perimeter that provide additional ideal locations to investigate and search for ice and other resources.
The Nobile Crater was the finalist out of four contenders not only because of the high chances of finding water, but also because of its rover-friendly and diverse terrain.
The area is easy enough for the four-wheeled rover to roam but diverse enough so that the solar-powered rover can access sunlight and gather data from parts of the moon at varying temperatures, terrain and depths.
"In doing so, it will really be able to provide the first ever comprehensive map of the distribution of volatiles, (like water), distribution of temperatures, and other environmental parameters that we think influenced the presence of water, and the form of water, that might be there," Colaprete said.
The other reason the Nobile Crater was chosen, NASA leaders said, was because of its proximity and visibility to Earth (nearly 200,000 miles away).
VIPER will travel roughly 10-15 square miles of the crater's 36 square miles in 100 days and be able to send data back to Earth almost immediately.
"Not only do we get to explore where the most dramatic landscapes there are in the solar system, but we get to react real time with the data, and, and use that real time interaction to even better the observations and better the planning and traverse," Colaprete said. "This provides an opportunity for unique discovery and reaction to the data that we take in real time, that we just don't usually have in other planetary missions." Typically, scientists wait weeks or months to get data back, but with the real time feature, scientists have more control of what it would like VIPER to explore.
The currently planned trajectory allows VIPER to visit at least six sites of scientific interest, "with additional time to spare," the agency wrote in a news release.
As the rover moves through each area of scientific interest, it will collect samples from as many as 12 drill locations. Samples collected from a variety of depths and temperatures will allow scientists to better predict where else ice may be present on the moon based on similar terrain, thus creating a global resource map of the moon.
Those interested in learning more about the VIPER mission can participate in the Reddit Ask Me Anything on NASA's moon exploration activities on Tuesday, Sept. 21 at 1 p.m. Pacific time.
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