Tag Archives: Rover

On Friday, Blue Origin won a major NASA contract to deliver a lunar rover to the moon, a strong vote of confidence in both the Blue Moon lander and the future of human exploration. The contract also means that the VIPER rover will finally see the lunar surface after NASA shelved the entire program last year due to delays and …

PARIS — NASA has revived a robotic lunar rover mission by selecting Blue Origin to deliver it to the moon’s south pole in 2027. NASA announced Sept. 19 that Blue Origin won a $190 million task order under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program to take the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, to the moon in …

NASA‘s Curiosity rover took advantage of a clear winter day to snap new panoramic pictures of one of Mars‘ most enduring mysteries.  A lookout point in the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high mountain, allowed the rover to see all the way across Gale Crater‘s floor. Near the center of the image is Peace Vallis, an ancient river channel thought …

VIPER has officially come back from the dead. The NASA moon robot, whose name is short for “Volatiles Investigating Polar Explorer Rover,” will hitch a ride to the lunar surface with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin in late 2027, agency officials announced this afternoon. “NASA is leading the world in exploring more of the moon than ever before, and this delivery …

Only a little over a week after scientists announced NASA’s Perseverance rover may have detected a potential biosignature in a Martian rock named Sapphire Canyon, a new study suggests similar habitable conditions were widespread across Jezero Crater — the site of that major discovery — broadening the stage for the search for ancient life on Mars. In the study, scientists …

A pair of new studies presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Science (EPSC-DPS) suggest the European Space Agency’s (ESA) upcoming Mars rover mission, Rosalind Franklin, may have better odds of detecting ancient organic material than previously realized. It all comes down to natural processes that occurred at the rover’s landing site: …

As part of the agency’s Artemis campaign, NASA has awarded Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, a CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) task order with an option to deliver a rover to the Moon’s South Pole region. NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) will search for volatile resources, such as ice, on the lunar surface and collect science data to …

For years, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has been exploring the slopes of Mount Sharp inside the Red Planet’s Gale Crater, looking for clues about Mars’ watery past. Recently, Curiosity turned its attention to a landscape of ridges, hollows and nodules that mission team members call “boxwork terrain.” What is it? This photo, taken by Curiosity’s Left Navigation Camera, shows the …

Luxury car-maker Jaguar Land Rover said Tuesday it will not resume vehicle manufacturing operations until at least September 24 due to a cyberattack earlier this month. In a new statement, the company said it informed colleagues, suppliers, and partners that the halt in production will extend into its third week. The company said this was due to “the controlled restart …

ARVADA, Colorado — Lunar Outpost, a private space company, is putting the pedal to the metal on its lunar terrain vehicle (LTV), a large rover that Artemis astronauts may use to wheel across the moon’s dusty, crater-pocked landscape. A tour of Lunar Outpost’s Mission Control here offered an up-close look at the status of the group’s LTV design, the Eagle, …