NASA is to send a golf-cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an effort to evaluate the vital resource ahead of a planned human return to the moon in 2024 to possibly use it for astronauts to drink and to make rocket fuel, the US space agency said on Friday.
The VIPER robot is to drive for kilometers on the dusty lunar surface to get a closer look at what NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has touted for months: Underground pockets of “hundreds of millions of tons of water ice” that could help turn the moon into a jumping-off point to Mars.
“VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is. We’re going to be able to characterize the water ice, and ultimately drill,” Bridenstine said on Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington.
“Why is this important? Because water ice represents something significant. Life support,” he said.
VIPER stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover.
The rover is expected to arrive on the moon’s south polar region in December 2022, carrying four instruments to sample lunar soil for traces of hydrogen and oxygen — the basic components of water that can be separated and synthesized into fuel for a planned fleet of commercial lunar launch vehicles.
In development at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, the VIPER robot would log “about 100 days of data that will be used to inform the first global water resource maps of the moon,” NASA said in announcing the plans.
NASA is in the process of kick-starting its Artemis program, an accelerated mission to put people back on the moon for the first time since the 1970s to train and prove technologies that would later be sent on a Mars mission.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
RSS