![]() They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. Because the terrain where VIPER will land-the edge of the massive Nobile Crater-is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER’s ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. “We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we’re going to be in,” says NASA’s VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews.Ī VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency’s recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover’s wheels. This is familiar technology in an unforgiving location. ![]() ![]() VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will roll down an offramp to touch the lunar soil, or regolith, when it lands on the moon in late 2024. On the moon, Apollo 15, 16, and 17 astronauts pulled mylar cables to unfold and lower their buggies from the vehicles’ compact stowage compartments on lunar landers.īut NASA’s first-ever rover mission to the lunar south pole will use a more familiar method of getting moving on Earth’s satellite: a pair of ramps. Cables attached to a rocket-powered “ sky crane” spacecraft dropped the Perseverance Mars rover to the Red Planet’s surface in 2021. NASA has used all kinds of techniques: The Pathfinder rover landed on Mars in 1997 inside a cluster of airbags, then rolled down its landing vehicle’s “petals,” which bloomed open like a flower, to the dusty surface. It’s no simple feat to send a rover to space, land it on a celestial body, and get the wheels rolling. ![]()
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