Illustration of Supermoon or Full Moon. (Pixabay)
Hitekno.com – NASA had planned to send a new mission to Month in search of whereabouts air on Earth’s natural satellite.
This new NASA mission will bring a robot named Viper assigned to search water on the Moon.
This plan is a long-term exploration mission, before astronauts are sent to the Moon’s surface in 2024.
Viper stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover and is slated for launch in 2023.
The space agency will send the golf cart-sized robot to the Moon’s South Pole, on a 100-day mission to search for ice deposits beneath the Moon’s surface.
Scientists hope to study whether the mission can generate water from the ice deposits and use it as a resource.
“We confirmed the presence of ice at the South Pole of the Moon. It’s just not clear exactly where the water is or how much,” said Dan Andrews, Viper project manager, quoted from Cnet, Monday (5/7/2021).
The rover is currently still in the prototype stage, but NASA plans to equip the Viper with a drill and some spectrometers.
The presence of the Viper to search for, extract and study potential ice deposits beneath the Moon’s surface.
On this mission, NASA will partner Astrobotic with a $200 million contract to send the Viper using the Griffin Moon lander.
The Griffin lander will be carried on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
That’s NASA’s plan in preparing a new mission to send a robotic rover Viper to search for water on the Moon. (Suara.com/ Lintang Siltya Utami).
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