NASA Wants To Send Spare Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover To the Moon (space.com) 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA provided an Artemis update today (June 30), announcing new lunar landing contracts for its Moon Base initiative and a surprise new possible rover mission that could be headed to the moon's south pole. During the second monthly update that NASA has provided for its moon base plans, the agency named Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines as the providers of four robotic landers that will deliver scientific payloads to the surface of the moon, as NASA tests and expands the technologies needed for a permanent human outpost. "This is this drawing on the playbook that worked very well for NASA during the 1960s," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the livestreamed update, explaining the experiential approach to a crewed lunar return. "We didn't just jump right to Apollo 11."
Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. "There is another," Isaacman said, quoting Yoda's line from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back." That test rover is called PROMISE, short for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration" (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own. Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity -- both of which remain active on Mars -- without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it. "We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we've got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in," he said. "So the question was posed: 'What if we send it to the moon?'"
With a little refurbishment, PROMISE would help advance NASA's lunar plans, Isaacman added. Like Perseverance and Curiosity, the test rover is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from naturally decaying radioactive material into electricity. So it wouldn't require sunlight to operate -- a real benefit on the moon, where most locations experience long stretches of darkness. (NASA plans to build its Artemis base near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor an abundance of water ice and also has a relatively complex lighting environment.) The other robots currently in the works to launch on future missions to the moon, including the landers announced during today's update, are all solar powered. Through 2029, NASA hopes to launch up to 20 such missions as part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative to support the first phase of the agency's moon base plans, and the landers announced today will be some of the first in that lineup.
Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. "There is another," Isaacman said, quoting Yoda's line from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back." That test rover is called PROMISE, short for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration" (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own. Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity -- both of which remain active on Mars -- without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it. "We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we've got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in," he said. "So the question was posed: 'What if we send it to the moon?'"
With a little refurbishment, PROMISE would help advance NASA's lunar plans, Isaacman added. Like Perseverance and Curiosity, the test rover is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from naturally decaying radioactive material into electricity. So it wouldn't require sunlight to operate -- a real benefit on the moon, where most locations experience long stretches of darkness. (NASA plans to build its Artemis base near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor an abundance of water ice and also has a relatively complex lighting environment.) The other robots currently in the works to launch on future missions to the moon, including the landers announced during today's update, are all solar powered. Through 2029, NASA hopes to launch up to 20 such missions as part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative to support the first phase of the agency's moon base plans, and the landers announced today will be some of the first in that lineup.
Isaacman is not immune to the disease (Score:3)
Of having to make stupid choices to appease one man's ego.
In a lot of ways I don't mind Isaacman so far at NASA, he seems to have a passion and he understands the issues NASA faces but thiis shows he is not an independent head of the agency because everything about this proposal is kindof silly and I can only imagine it comes from a need to "get something on the moon" in the next 2 years. I doubt JPL wants this, I mean, who would ditch their test platform while both units are active on Mars?
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So even by your estimation Perseverance has at least 8 years of life left in it, Curiosity could operate for another 7 let's say so seems prudent to keep a test unit for our 2 multi-million dollar rovers.
Also now the good engineering practice is "well, nothing *should* go wrong, right guys?". That is exactly the attitude that makes me feel pretty confident this didn't come from JPL but came politically, yes, politically.
You seem to imply that he wants to put something on the lunar surface in the next two years for political reasons
That is exactly what I mean and I think I have good reason to believe so.
but it would be just as bad to artificially delay deployment until after two years out for political reasons.
False choice,
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As we have seen on other probes (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/13/1138224/the-ultimate-in-debugging [slashdot.org]), the possibility of equipment / logic breaks on the remote equipment goes up with time. The solutions to these issues are often not straightforward, and the possibility of complete failure with a single mistake in any attempted fix is high.
Conclusion: the need increases for a local test article to run simulations of 'outside the
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This, though for the most part, you don't need the whole rover — only its brain (and perhaps its communications electronics). The situations where you need the whole rover involve figuring out how to get it unstuck. And the more experience they have at running the things around on Mars, the less likely that becomes.
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The Mars rovers (and various spacecraft) have had plenty of mechanical issues, for which having an identical system on Earth has been useful to essential to figuring out a solution.
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What kind of updates/changes/fixes are left to make?
Spirit and Opportunity were receiving software updates pretty much up to the point that each one died. They received substantial new capabilities compared to their original "as-shipped" software - semi-autonomous driving, for one. And, in good swdev practice, new releases were thoroughly tested - including on flight-identical hardware. Here is one article [acm.org] from 8 years after landing, talking about developing and pushing out an autonomous image target selection routine.
Re: Isaacman is not immune to the disease (Score:1)
Would JPL really need an entire, complete rover to test software upgrades? I understand they'll want to send updates to the rovers over the course of their lifetime, but seems to me after, say, 8-10 of working with the unit they've pretty-much nailed down basic operations, and now they are making adjustments to accommodate failures on the deployed units or optimize software and/or power consumption - things of that nature.
Let's ask the other question, how long would it take to make a fourth rover, specifica
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He badly needs a success. Something he can show to the public and the boss man as a win. This may be it.
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He badly needs a success. Something he can show to the public and the boss man as a win. This may be it.
Given the recent track record of lunar probes crashing and/or landing ass side up, the odds of success for this rush job are not good.
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I agree there is something fishy about this. Not only will it leave the 2 landers on Mars without a test platform on Earth, it will also leave PROMISE without a test platform on Earth! I'm also surprised the test platform has a working RTG generator when there probably is a wall outlet it could have used instead, though perhaps they wanted to be absolutely authentic.
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Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] speculated that "The space agency is effectively on a wartime footing as it seeks to accelerate plans to land humans on the Moon’s south pole before China and to explore the most interesting terrain there first." Isaacman hisself said, "“We’ve got the hardware, and this is exactly what we should be trying to do to put wins on the board, getting a capability like Promise to the surface of the Moon", so he seems to be thinking in terms of competition.
Alternatives (Score:2)
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A common misconception but Mr Fusion powers the time circuits only.
Your 4Runner's internal combustion engine runs on regular high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
Odd choice (Score:5, Insightful)
It's designed for the wrong atmosphere, wrong g, wrong instrumentation, probably the wrong nav system.
Oh, and it is the reference model for some currently deployed devices that can't be physically accessed for diagnostics.
It has the nice attribute of already existing, I'll give it that.
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Sterilization probably is not needed for the Moon. Most things die and we have already contaminated it plenty anyway.
"is", or "would be" nuclear-powered? (Score:2)
All of the images and reporting I've been able to find about the OPTIMISM test rover at JPL show it without the RTG installed and with a bunch of tethers. This makes sense, because 99% of the tests JPL would want to do don't care about where the power comes from, and having an RTG wheeling around (despite their gener
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No, it doesn't have an RTG installed, but I couldn't find any definite statements to that effect, only vague allusions like this [arstechnica.com] "NASA has an MMRTG available".
Also interesting, from Space Daily [spacedaily.com]: "A fully built, fully tested lunar rover named VIPER faced dismantlement for parts after its 2024 cancellation, and NASA is now considering sending a Mars engineering testbed that has spent its working life in a JPL rock yard to the Moon instead .... VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover NASA
As One Does (Score:2)
I wonder what other nuc-u-lar powered devices we can chuck up there?
moon nukes (Score:2)
Temperature swings on Mars and the Moon (Score:2)
I don't know if the hardware will be able to operate in the wider temperature swings on the moon.
Mars: 45 to -70 degrees centigrade
Moon: 120 to -130 degrees centigrade.
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High temperature on Mars is more in the 20C range close to the equator under special conditions.
Moon is much colder, and the high temperature is not really a "temperature" but insulation and heating up of the ground. I would rather think it goes down to -180C and up to 300C - but that is a wild guess from my part.
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Moon is much colder, and the high temperature is not really a "temperature" but insulation and heating up of the ground.
Did you mean "insolation", as in sunlight? As you say, it wouldn't be temperature in the same sense as on Earth, since the temperatures we talk about on Earth are air temperatures, and there's no air on the moon.
"Insulation" also does apply: it's hard to get rid of heat in a vacuum.
The sun is killer, but at least it's a dry heat -- there's no humidity.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul? (Score:1)
But the older that Perseverance and Curiosity get the more engineering baby-sitting they will need. Repurposing the test rover risks shortening their life. Judging the need based on the first half of Mars missions is insufficient. Past 50