NASA’s VIPER mission will break new ground for rovers in a very special way

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA's VIPER rover mission will hunt for traces of water on the Moon's South Pole.
• Due to the angle of light and the dark terrain, NASA will equip the rover with headlights.
• This is the first time a NASA rover has been built with headlights.

NASA is going back to the Moon — with humans, no less! — very, very soon. Nobody quite knows if the space agency is going to make its 2024 "deadline" sending humans to the lunar surface but regardless of when these human and robotic missions take place, they're going to take place. NASA's newest lunar rover, VIPER, has a very specific mission ahead of it, as it's being sent to the Moon's South Pole in search of water.

With a seemingly straightforward objective, you wouldn't imagine that the rover would need to be significantly different from other rovers that the space agency has sent into space before, but you'd be very wrong. The rover is obviously equipped with the special hardware it will need to sample and test materials it comes across, but it will also be decked out with something that no NASA rover has ever had before: headlights.

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NASA’s VIPER mission will break new ground for rovers in a very special way originally appeared on BGR.com on Sun, 8 Nov 2020 at 10:33:32 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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