Nasa has successfully launched rovers to celestial bodies using various techniques. The Pathfinder rover landed on Mars in 1997 inside a cluster of airbags, while the Perseverance Mars rover was dropped in 2021 with cables attached to a rocket-powered "sky crane" spacecraft.
On the mission to the moon, Apollo astronauts used mylar cables to land on lunar landers.
However, Nasa's first-ever rover mission to the south pole of the moon will use a more conventional means of propulsion: two ramps.
When VIPER, an acronym for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, touches down on the moon in late 2024, it will roll down an offramp to feel the regolith. This is familiar technology in an unforgiving location, Popular Science reported.
"We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimise it for the environment we’re going to be in," says Nasa's VIPER programme manager, Daniel Andrews.
Based on recently released images from Nasa, a VIPER test vehicle recently descended down two metal ramps, one ramp for each set of the rover's wheels, at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California.
The engineering team has been testing VIPER's capacity to descend the ramps at extreme angles due to the expected roughness of the terrain where VIPER will land—the edge of the enormous Nobile Crater. The differences in elevation between the ramps for each wheel and the steepness—measured from the lander VIPER will descend from — have been changed.
"We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too," Andrews says. "So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate, as we’re at that moment where we have to roll off the lander."
VIPER is referred to as a "scientific successor" to Nasa's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole.
"It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water," says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. "That really started the moon rush, commercially and by state actors like Nasa and other space agencies."
If there is an abundance of ice, it could be used for rocket propellant and water supply in lunar habitats, as Nasa plans to construct them in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon programme. The VIPER mobile rover will probe ice distribution more closely.
Drilling beneath the lunar surface and exploring steep, shadowed regions are tasks the rover can perform. It can navigate a 15-degree slope easily, avoiding the need for a machine designed for trickier descents. This allows for scientifically relevant opportunities without creating a superheroic rover.
VIPER, developed by Nasa Ames and Astrobotic, is a square golf cart-sized vehicle with four wheels, unlike Nasa's Mars rovers.
These wheels are independent, can roll in any direction, crawl out of soft regolith, and have paddle-like treads called grousers. The rover's shoulder-like joints enable it to crawl out of soft regolith, similar to the Mars rovers.
"The metaphor I like to use is we have the ability to dip a toe into the [permanently shadowed region]," Andrews says. "If we find we’re surprised or don't like what we’re finding, we have the ability to lift that toe out, roll away on three wheels, and then put it back down."
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