NASA's Artemis lunar rover, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, will explore the relatively nearby but extreme environment of the Moon in search of ice and other potential resources.

This mobile robot will land at the South Pole of the Moon in late 2024 on a 100-day mission. The critical information it provides will teach us about the origin and distribution of water on the Moon and help determine how we can harvest the Moon's resources for future human space exploration.

NASA will use the data the rover collects to show where the Moon's ice is most likely to be found and easiest to access, making VIPER the first-ever resource mapping mission on another celestial body. The first resource maps of the Moon will mark a critical step forward for NASA's Artemis missions to establish a long-term presence on the surface of the Moon.

Thanks to past missions such as satellites orbiting the Moon or impacting its surface, we know there is ice at the lunar poles. But to be able to use it one day, we need to learn more about that water – up close and personal. VIPER will roam the Moon using its three instruments and a 3.28-foot (1-meter) drill to detect and analyze various lunar soil environments at a range of depths and temperatures. The rover will venture into permanently shadowed craters, some of the coldest spots in the solar system, where ice reserves have endured for billions of years.

VIPER’s instruments will also make important scientific measurements. Determining the distribution, physical state and composition of these ice deposits will help us understand the sources of the lunar polar water, giving us insight into the distribution and origin of water and other volatiles across the solar system.

During VIPER’s exploration of the Moon, the rover will endure extreme temperature conditions, dynamic lighting, and complex terrain, while near-real-time rover driving will present new engineering and design challenges the team must overcome.

Courtesy of NASA.

Falcon Heavy is designed and manufactured by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. It is derived from the Falcon 9 vehicle and consists of a strengthened Falcon 9 first stage as a central core with two additional first stages as strap-on boosters.

Stats

Total launches: 9

Total landings: 17

Total reflights: 14

Specs

Height: 70m / 229.6ft

Width: 12.2m / 39.9ft

Mass: 1,420,788kg / 3,125,735lb

Payload to LEO: 63,800 kg / 140,660 lb

Payload to GEO: 26,700 kg / 58,860 lb

Payload to Mars: 16,800 kg / 37,040 lb

Lineage

SpaceX conducted Falcon Heavy's first launch on February 6th, 2018, at 3:45 PM EST. The rocket carried a Tesla Roadster belonging to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, with a dummy dubbed "Starman" in the driver's seat.

The second Falcon Heavy launch occurred on April 11th, 2019. This launch successfully launched the Arabsat-6A satellite and all three booster rockets successfully returned to Earth except but the center core subsequently fell over and was lost during transport due to heavy seas.

The third Falcon Heavy launch successfully occurred on June 25th, 2019. This mission successfully launched multiple payloads including USAF STP-2, a space memorial for Celestis, and Lightsail-2. The mission also supported the U.S. Air Force National Security Space Launch certification process for the Falcon Heavy. The side boosters were successfully recovered but the center core failed to land and was destroyed on impact with the Atlantic Ocean.

The fourth Falcon Heavy mission, USSF-44 for the U.S. Space Force, successfully launched on November 1st, 2022 from Kennedy Space Center.

The fifth Falcon Heavy mission launched USSF-67 on January 15th, 2023.

The soxth Falcon Heavy mission launched ViaSat-3 Americas on April 30th, 2023.

The seventh Falcon Heavy mission launched EchoStar 24 (Jupiter 3) on July 28th, 2023.

The eighth Falcon Heavy mission launched Psyche on October 13th, 2023.

Photo by SpaceX

NASA's historic Kennedy Space Center is located on Cape Canaveral, Florida, and has hosted decades of historic space missions since the early days of the Apollo program.

Today, Kennedy Space Center is a multi-user spaceport and hosts private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, and others.

SpaceX leases Launch Complex 39A at NASA's flagship facility and uses the pad to launch its Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 rockets. The pad is also used to launch missions for the Commercial Crew Program for which SpaceX launches astronauts to the Space Station for NASA aboard their Crew Dragon capsule.

Launch Complex 39A was previously used by NASA to launch the Apollo 11 mission to land the first humans on the moon and Space Shuttle missions to assemble the International Space Station and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

The VIPER rover will be delivered to the Moon by Astrobotic's Griffin lander and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative. Astrobotic will be responsible for integrating VIPER onto their lander, selecting a launch provider, launching from Earth, and landing on the Moon.

VIPER will be the largest and heaviest payload delivered by a CLPS provider, demonstrating the capability of industry partners to fly a range of payloads to the Moon for NASA.

Through CLPS, commercial delivery missions – including VIPER and many other missions with planned payloads – will perform science experiments, test technologies, and demonstrate capabilities to help NASA explore the Moon and prepare for human missions.

VIPER's delivery must meet a critical timing window. The commercial partner must land VIPER on the Moon at the start of the “summer season” on the South Pole when periods of sunlight are longest to support rover operations.

Landing site: Nobile Region of Moon's South Pole.

Delivery to the Moon: Launch vehicle and lander provided by a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services partner.

Mission duration: 100 Earth days, covering 3 cycles of lunar day and night.

Distance goal: 12 miles (20 kilometers).

Rover size: Similar to a golf cart: 5 feet by 5 feet by 8 feet (1.5 meters by 1.5 meters by 2.5 meters) and 992 pounds (450 kilograms).

Onboard instruments: 3 spectrometers and a 3.28-foot (1-meter) drill.

Power: Solar-charged battery, peak power of 450 watts.

Top speed: 0.45 mph (0.72 kph).

Communications: X-band direct-to-Earth (no relay) over the Deep Space Network.

The VIPER team faces some brand new challenges operating a rover on the Moon, different from those tackled by previous rover missions to Mars.

Extreme temperatures: The rover's hardware will need to withstand surface temperatures varying by 500 degrees Fahrenheit between sunlight and shade. A battery, heat pipes, and radiators will help keep the rover’s parts from freezing or overheating.

Real-time drivers: The Moon is much closer to Earth than Mars, so there will be little delay when transmitting commands to the rover. That means drivers on Earth can operate VIPER interactively. With a lot of ground to cover on a tight schedule over complex terrain, the drivers' efforts will be key. Because of the dim-to-dark lighting at the South Pole, drivers will have to operate in places where we do not have good "scouting" images from orbit. Computer simulations of the mission will allow them to practice this critical operation before launch.

Mobility: They can't be exactly sure what the soil in the Moon's polar regions will be like – hard and compacted, fluffy, or somewhere in between. As a result, VIPER is designed for unprecedented agility. The rover can drive sideways or diagonally, spin in a circle and move in any direction without changing the way it's facing. If it encounters soft soils, it will even be able to walk its wheels by moving each wheel independently to free itself.

Complex route planning: The extreme swings in light and dark at the poles of the Moon are nothing like those on Earth or Mars – and produce extremely long and fast-moving shadows. The solar-powered VIPER must retreat from these advancing shadows as it seeks out the right territory to sample while maintaining communications with Earth. Periods of darkness will be long – up to one Earth week – so VIPER will be periodically parked in identified safe havens at high elevations where the darkness only lasts four days. Combining all these needs makes for complicated route planning.

First rover with headlights: VIPER will explore inside dark craters where the Sun never reaches, making it the first NASA rover to need headlights. However, rover engineers face a brand new challenge in building a lighting-plus-camera system to operate in the Moon's harsh temperatures and extreme conditions of light and dark.

Courtesy of NASA

Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) is an 86-meter-wide circular landing pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and is one of two SpaceX booster landing pads at the Florida spaceport.

Built on former Launch Complex 13, LZ-1 was the site of SpaceX's first successful landing and recovery of a Falcon 9 on the ORBCOMM-2 mission in December 2015. Since then, it has hosted 16 landings.

The landing pad, as well as its twin, LZ-2 located a few dozen meters away, can support both single landings of a Falcon 9 or simultaneous landings of the two Falcon Heavy side boosters.

Photo by Jenny Hautmann for Supercluster

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Collect this photo of a double booster landing: Jenny Hautmann's capture of two Falcon Heavy side boosters returning to Earth after launch.

SpaceX will discard the center core of the Falcon Heavy rocket, which will be dropped into the Atlantic Ocean.

The primary reason why SpaceX does not attempt to recover the center core is to allow the Falcon Heavy to put a greater amount of mass into a geostationary orbit, as it is commonly used for heavy geostationary satellites that require the center core to be expended.

To minimize weight, the center core will have its landing legs and grid fins removed.