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NASA Plans to Land Water-Hunting Robot on Moon in 2022

Reuters

   WASHINGTON - NASA will send a golf-cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022
   to search for deposits of water below the surface, an effort to
   evaluate the vital resource ahead of a planned human return to the moon
   in 2024 to possibly use it for astronauts to drink and to make rocket
   fuel, the U.S. space agency said Friday.

   The VIPER robot will drive for miles (km) on the dusty lunar surface to
   get a closer look at what NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has touted
   for months: underground pockets of "hundreds of millions of tons of
   water ice" that could help turn the moon into a jumping-off point to
   Mars.

   "VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is. We're going to be
   able to characterize the water ice, and ultimately drill," Bridenstine
   said Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington.
   "Why is this important? Because water ice represents something
   significant. Life support."

   VIPER stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover.

   The rover is expected to arrive on the moon's south polar region in
   December 2022, carrying four instruments to sample lunar soil for
   traces of hydrogen and oxygen -- the basic components of water that can
   be separated and synthesized into fuel for a planned fleet of
   commercial lunar launch vehicles.

   In development at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, the VIPER
   robot will log "about 100 days of data that will be used to inform the
   first global water resource maps of the moon," NASA said in announcing
   the plans.

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