NASA has cancelled a major Moon mission despite spending almost half a billion dollars on it. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) project was originally planned to launch late last year, but in 2022 NASA delayed it until late 2024 with further issues putting the launch date back until 2025. NASA now plans to disassemble VIPER and reuse the craft’s instruments and components on future Moon missions.
VIPER, about the size of a golf cart, would have prospected the lunar south pole for water ice in the soil with the aim of creating resource maps for future missions to the Moon. The craft would have spent 100 days roaming tens of kilometres where it would have used a neutron spectrometer to detect water molecules below the lunar surface. Another component of the mission was to use a drill to dig up the soil and determining the composition and concentration of the material via two other spectrometers.
NASA had already spent $450m on VIPER and the craft was currently undergoing testing. NASA says it will save about $85m by cancelling the mission while continuing with it would have threatened the “cancellation or disruption” of other Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions. The CLPS involves NASA working with US companies to build and launch lunar missions.
NASA will now “pursue alternative methods” to accomplish some of VIPER’s goals. The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), for example, is scheduled to land at the south pole later this year aboard the lunar lander IM-2 built by Intuitive Machines as part of the CLPS programme. PRIME-1 will drill into the Moon’s surface where it lands and use a mass spectrometer to measure ice samples.
“We are committed to studying and exploring the Moon for the benefit of humanity through the CLPS program,” notes Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “The agency has an array of missions planned to look for ice and other resources on the Moon over the next five years. Our path forward will make maximum use of the technology and work that went into VIPER, while preserving critical funds to support our robust lunar portfolio.”
Phil Metzger, director of the Stephen W. Hawking Center for Microgravity Research and Education at the University of Central Florida, said on X that the cancellation is a “bad mistake” and the mission would have been “revolutionary”. “VIPER was going to be an important step towards answering the question ‘are we alone in the cosmos?’” he says. “Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”
Fox says NASA has already notified Congress of the decision, but Metzger now wants Congress to find the money to continue the mission. “[The cancellation] will be harmful to sustainability in space exploration, to geopolitical challenges in space, and to the most important, science,” he adds.
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