This unexplored area of the lunar surface has landscapes more ancient than any of the Apollo sites, and it may be rich in resources that could be useful to future human crews.
. India’s first craft to attempt a moon landing in September 2019 also crashed.
The first image of the moon's surface taken by India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft after its historic touchdown on August 23, 2023.Before long, however, a new wave of robots could join the Pragyaan rover and Vikram lander on the moon. A, or the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, is slated to launch Saturday, August 26, hitching a ride with a new space telescope, both developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency .
An engineer works with a prototype of the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover in a test bed of quicksand-like soil in the “sink tank” at the Simulated Lunar Operations Laboratory, or Slope Lab, at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The VIPER rover will operate at the moon’s south pole to look for water ice. It can pivot each wheel independently and “swim” to get itself out of deep, fine sand. Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
JAXA may not have to wait that long, though, as its SLIM lander could launch this week. The eight-foot-tall craft will orbit the moon before attempting a pinpoint landing using image recognition technology to identify craters and precisely determine its location. During the final descent, a sophisticated radar will help the spacecraft land within 100 meters of its target. By contrast, the Chandrayaan-3 landing zone was an ellipse about four kilometers wide.
“The south pole is an incredible, incredible world. It’s topography is extreme, with these really large craters, very tall mountains,” says Anthony Colaprete, the project scientist for the VIPER mission at the Ames Research Center in California. “It is really a fascinating landscape.”The craters at the moon’s south pole have entranced scientists for decades. They include some of the oldest and largest lunar craters and hold clues about the state of the solar system more than 3.
“If water ice is present in quantities and in a distributed state that is recoverable, that would be valuable,” Kring says. “Water, first of all, is useful as an astronaut consumable. It’s useful because it’s a very effective shield against space radiation. And third, you can separate the hydrogen and the oxygen for rocket propellant.”
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