GoKawiilNASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region.
The car-sized rover nicknamed “Promise,” which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and was not otherwise planned for a launch, would land equipped with a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. NASA’s other rovers primarily operate on solar power.
“We are thinking very hard right now about sending Promise to the Moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday during a monthly update on the agency’s plans to build a Moon base.
“An awesome capability”
NASA has an MMRTG available, with a supply of Plutonium-238 that is just decaying away. It is likely the rover, with a mass of about 1 ton, would need to be delivered by Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander or SpaceX’s Starship due to its size.
Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, another NASA official spearheading the Moon base initiative, were clearly fired up about the possibility of using existing hardware to bring new capabilities to the lunar program.
“That would be an awesome capability,” García-Galán said. “For Moon-based objectives, having a nuclear RTG on it allows us to go anywhere we want, regardless of the illumination. Surviving the lunar night is going to be one of the bigger challenges with this capability, we wouldn’t have to worry about that. So, long traverses getting into those very hard-to-reach areas, just like Curiosity and Perseverance have shown us on the surface of Mars, that would be awesome.”
No longer needed as a test bed?
Over the years, Promise has served as a test bed for problems that Perseverance might encounter on Mars. Commands are often tested on this vehicle in the “Mars yard” at the California laboratory before similar commands are sent to the rover on the surface of Mars. It has also helped ensure Perseverance can safely traverse various areas on Mars.