VIPER (rover)
lunar rover
VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) is a lunar rover being developed at the NASA Ames Research Center. The rover's main mission is to prospect for lunar resources in permanently shadowed areas of lunar south pole region, especially by mapping the distribution and concentration of water ice. The mission is built on a previous NASA rover concept, the Resource Prospector, which had been cancelled in 2018.
VIPER was to be carried aboard Astrobotic's Griffin lander as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. However, NASA terminated the VIPER project in July 2024 due to cost increases and launch delays. NASA subsequently revived the project in September 2025, releasing an Announcement for Partnership Proposal seeking U.S. companies to deliver and operate the completed VIPER rover on the Moon. On September 19, 2025, NASA selected Blue Origin to carry VIPER to the Moon. Under this partnership, Blue Origin will design, test, and operate a lander to carry the rover to the moon.
Objectives
The VIPER rover has a size similar to a golf cart (around 1.4 × 1.4 × 2 m), and is tasked with prospecting for lunar resources, especially for water ice, mapping its distribution, and measuring its depth and purity. The water distribution and form must be better understood before it can be evaluated as a potential resource within any evolvable lunar or Mars campaign.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q73008169. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2024 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “VIPER (rover)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.