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.
NASA is set to hold a media conference on Monday, September 20th to announce the landing site of its next robotic moon rover. The VIPER rover, short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will be NASA’s first-ever robotic rover on the Moon. Unlike the Mars rovers, VIPER’s main objectives will be mapping potentially useful resources on the Moon’s south pole. These resources include ice-rich areas that could prove useful to future human exploration of the lunar surface.
NASA’s Ames Research center in Silicon Valley, California is currently managing the VIPER program and will announce the exact rover landing site on Monday. Where this site is located will have broad implications for the upcoming human settlement of the moon. The rover is part of NASA’s Artemis program, which has goals of eventually sending humans back to the Moon by the late 2020s. In advance of these crewed missions, the VIPER rover is set to land sometime in late 2023.
Teleconference audio will be live-streamed at http://www.nasa.gov/live, and Space Explored will attend the call, so make sure to check back for future coverage!
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