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The public now has a live front-row seat to watch NASA’s first robotic lunar rover take shape in the clean room of the Surface Segment Test and Integration Facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Members of SNAKE (short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) and the Communications Office at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, will host viewing parties and answer questions from the public about the mission in both English and Spanish.
These web chats and observation meetings will take place as the rover is assembled and tested, approximately once a month from November 2023 to January 2024. In late 2024, VIPER will embark on a mission to the lunar South Pole to enter permanently shadowed areas and unravel the mysteries of the Moon’s water.
“We are very excited for people to see how the VIPER rover hardware is built,” said Daniel Andrews, VIPER mission project manager at NASA Ames. “All of our planning and ideas now go into building this lunar rover, the first of its kind.”
Individual components, such as the rover’s scientific instruments, lights and wheels, have already been assembled and tested. Once delivered to the testing facility, other components will be integrated to become the approximately 1,000-pound VIPER.
Months of final assembly and testing lie ahead before VIPER is ready to ship to the astrobotic payload processing facility in Florida in mid-2024. VIPER’s lunar landing on top Mons Mouton is scheduled for late 2024, where it will get a close-up view of the lunar surface and measure the location and concentration of water ice and other resources. Using their drill and three scientific instruments, researchers will better understand how frozen water and other volatiles are distributed on the Moon, their cosmic origin, and what has kept them preserved in lunar soil for billions of years. VIPER will also report on future Sagebrush missions by helping to characterize the lunar environment and helping determine places where water and other resources could be harvested to sustain humans on extended missions.
NASA Ames manages the VIPER mission and also directs science, systems engineering, real-time rover surface operations, and rover flight software. The rover is being designed and built by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, while instruments are provided by Ames, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and commercial partner Honeybee Robotics in Altadena, California. The spacecraft, lander and launch vehicle that will carry VIPER to the surface of the Moon will be provided through NASA. Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, delivering science and technology payloads to and near the Moon.
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