NASA is considering repurposing an engineering development version of the nuclear-powered Mars rovers for a different destination: the moon’s south polar region.
The plan calls for turning the test rover, which is currently sitting at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into a lunar explorer named PROMISE (“Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration”).
During an update on the space agency’s long-range plan to build a moon base, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stressed that the PROMISE mission was still being defined, but added that “there’s very little that would hold us back from making use of that hardware.”
NASA is already planning to send a rover called VIPER (“Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover”) to the moon by the end of next year. But Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s program manager for the Moon Base effort, said PROMISE would bring some capabilities that VIPER lacks.
