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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 bob_super on Monday April 30 2018, @04:45PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 30 2018, @04:45PM (#673801)

    If they've already got hi-rez images of the area, maybe they don't need anything more.
    Maybe a Rover is a waste of money, a distraction, and something they feel they don't have to wait for.

    Or maybe, just maybe, NASA's limited budget and ever-shifting priorities have taken yet another victim, which had previously gone through a million reviews and committees agreeing that there was more science per dollar with that rover than with also-attractive alternatives, enough to justify allocating the funding.

    Why would the Chinese have anything to do with this ?

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