NASA considers sending a spare Mars rover to the moon to rev up preparations for lunar base

NASA is considering repurposing an engineering development version of the nuclear-powered Mars rovers for a different destination: the moon’s south polar region.

The plan calls for turning the test rover, which is currently sitting at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into a lunar explorer named PROMISE (“Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration”).

During an update on the space agency’s long-range plan to build a moon base, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stressed that the PROMISE mission was still being defined, but added that “there’s very little that would hold us back from making use of that hardware.”

NASA is already planning to send a rover called VIPER (“Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover”) to the moon by the end of next year. But Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s program manager for the Moon Base effort, said PROMISE would bring some capabilities that VIPER lacks. For example, PROMISE’s plutonium power source makes that rover more suited for exploring permanently shadowed lunar craters that are thought to contain valuable water ice.

“VIPER uses solar power, so we’re constrained to the terrain that we put it on, how much illumination that’s going to get, the time of year, where it can go,” García-Galán explained. “It could certainly not potentially go into some of these permanently shadowed regions and stay deep in there — and then, based on the lunar nights, it will have a lifespan that’s limited.”

In contrast, the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover is still going strong 14 years after landing on Mars, and the Perseverance rover is still persevering after five years of operation.

Today’s Moon Base update provided a status report on several aspects of NASA’s plans to build a permanent base on the moon in the 2030s. Among the highlights:

• A robotic lunar lander that’s being built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture “looks like it’s almost done,” García-Galán said. The Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, dubbed Endurance, had been due for launch this year on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, though a recent New Glenn explosion raised questions about the timeline. Isaacman said launching New Glenn was still “Plan A” for the Blue Moon mission. If the launch slips past mid-2027, NASA will look at other options, García-Galán said.
• Two other missions for the first phase of the Moon Base program are also progressing. Astrobotic’s Griffin 1 lunar lander appears on track for launch this year, while Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander “is looking pretty good,” García-Galán said.
• NASA announced that it would fund four more robotic lunar lander missions during Phase 1 of the Moon Base program, which runs through 2029. Astrobotic has been awarded $297.9 million for two deliveries. NASA will give $144.2 million to Firefly Aerospace and $148.3 million to Intuitive Machines for one delivery each. Each lander will carry cameras to document the effects of rocket blasts on lunar soil, deposit reflective location markers and monitor the lunar radiation environment. Other payloads could be added to each mission.
• Isaacman pressed García-Galán to promise that one of the robotic landers would carry a soccer ball to the moon if the U.S. wins the World Cup. “We will absolutely find a space,” García-Galán replied. Isaacman said that would serve as “a little bit of motivation” for the U.S. team. “We’re going to one-up Alan Shepard and the golf game on the lunar surface,” the administrator told García-Galán. “We’re going to get the soccer ball there. I don’t know which lander it’ll wind up going on. I’ll leave that to you guys to handle the payloading.”