Thousands of scientists protested at the US Congress over the “unprecedented and indefensible” decision by Nasa to cancel its decision. Adder moon rover mission.
In an open letter to Capitol Hill, they condemned the move, unveiled last month, and heavily criticized the space agency for a decision that shocked astronomers and astrophysicists around the world.
The car-sized rover has already been built at a cost of $450m and was scheduled to be sent to the moon next year, when it would have used a one-meter bore to look for ice below the lunar surface in soil at the moon’s south pole.
Ice is considered essential to plans to build a lunar colony, not only to provide astronauts with water, but also to provide them with hydrogen and oxygen that can be used as fuel. As a result, prospecting for resources has been rated as a priority for lunar exploration, which is expected to be intensified in the next few years with the goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the moon.
Construction of Viper—a volatile matter-probing polar exploration rover—began several years ago, and the highly complex robotic vehicle was nearly complete when Nasa announced on July 17 that he had decided to kill it. The agency said the move was necessary because of past cost increases, delays to launch dates and the risks of future cost growth.
However, the claim has been dismissed by surprised and outraged scientists who say the rover would have played an important role in opening up the moon to human colonization.
“Frankly, the agency’s decision beggars belief,” said Prof Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.
“Viper is a fundamental mission on so many fronts and its cancellation basically undermines NASA’s entire lunar exploration program for the next decade. It is as simple as that. Canceling Viper makes no sense at all.”
This view was supported by Ben Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, who was one of the organizers of the open letter to Congress. “A team of 500 people dedicated years of their careers to building Viper and now it’s been canceled for no good reason whatsoever,” he told the Observer last week.
“Fortunately, I think Congress is taking this issue very seriously and they have the power to tell Nasa to go ahead with the project. Hopefully they will intervene.”
Several other water prospecting missions to the moon are planned for the next few years. However, most will involve monitoring the lunar surface from space or by landing a single excavator that will dig for ice in a single, fixed location.
“The crucial advantage of Viper was that it could move around and burrow into the lunar soil at various promising locations,” said Ian Crawford, professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London.
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Astronomers have long suspected that ice – delivered by comets and asteroids – exists in the permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south poles, an idea strongly supported in 2009 when Nasa deliberately A Centaur rocket crashed in the crater Cabeus.
By studying the resulting debris plumes, scientists concluded that ice could make up up to 5% of the ground there. “China, Japan, India and Europe all have plans to search for water on the moon, but now the US seems to have just given up,” Crawford added. “It’s very, very puzzling.”
Scientists also point out that ice and other material brought to the moon by comets or asteroids has remained there in a pristine state, and scientists have a history of the inner solar system and the processes that shaped it for millions or even billions of years. , can provide. in the past. “There’s an incredible scientific treasure trove there that’s begging to be explored,” Neal added.
When Nasa announced its decision to abandon Viper, the space agency said it planned to disassemble its components and reuse them for other lunar missions – unless other space companies or agencies offer to take over the project. More than a dozen groups have since expressed an interest in taking over Viper, a Nasa spokesman said Observer last week. However, whether these organizations are interested in Viper as a complete craft or as a source of components is not yet clear.
“We simply don’t know how practical or serious these offers are,” Fernando said. “Nasa keeps saying that they had to cancel projects because of budget problems, but why on earth did they choose such an important mission to start making those cuts?”
