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posted by takyon on Monday April 30 2018, @02:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the escape-from-the-return-to-the-moon dept.

The Washington Post reports that NASA "has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development," Resource Prospector. From Wikipedia:

Resource Prospector is a cancelled mission concept by NASA of a rover that would have performed a survey expedition on a polar region of the Moon. The rover was to attempt to detect and map the location of volatiles such as hydrogen, oxygen and lunar water which could foster more affordable and sustainable human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System bodies.

The mission concept was still in its pre-formulation stage, when it was scrapped in April 2018. The Resource Prospector mission was proposed to be launched in 2022.

takyon: Meanwhile, NASA is "pushing hard on deep space exploration" with the Moon as its goal.

Also at Space.com, The Verge, and Fortune.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 30 2018, @05:33AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday April 30 2018, @05:33AM (#673607) Journal

    How many years or decades will it take for China to begin industrialization of the Moon? No, not a small colony, but significant industrial activity, manned or robotic, with reusable rockets and cheap $/kg to get things onto the surface of the Moon. Will China's current one party system survive that long? We'll see.

    NASA requires authentication to control its spacecraft these days, and may be encrypting the data sent back as well. And your wild speculation that the capabilities would be redundant, unnecessary, and only help the Chinese is just flatly false [theverge.com]:

    Scientists have proposed the idea of mining the water ice at the poles, to turn it into drinking water or rocket fuel. But we won’t know if we can even access this precious resource unless we send a robot up there to check out the area first, and now NASA has canceled its quickest way to find that out. “There are no other [NASA] missions being planned to go to the surface of the Moon,” Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at University of Central Florida who is part of the science team for Resource Prospector, tells The Verge.

    NASA released a statement after this story’s initial publication, saying that some of the instruments from the Resource Prospector mission would be used in other missions that would land on the moon later. The response was oddly vague about the fate of the rover. “We’re committed to lunar exploration,” said Jim Bridenstein, NASA’s recently sworn-in administrator. “Resource Prospector instruments will go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign.” The tweet, like the statement, made no reference to the rover itself.

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