WASHINGTON — NASA hopes to determine by early next year the next steps for a lunar rover mission that it canceled in July amid confusion over the timing of the decision.

Speaking at an Oct. 28 meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG), Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that the agency was reviewing responses to a request for information (RFI) that the agency issued in August looking for alternative uses for its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft.

NASA released the RFI after a decision announced in July to cancel the missionwhose launch had been postponed to September 2025 at the earliest on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. The agency said then that it would solicit expressions of interest from organizations interested in taking over the nearly complete rover.

“We received about 50 expressions of interest, which, I tell you, ranged from a whole range of fairly detailed, logical, well-thought-out ideas, to things that didn’t seem very logical or, bluntly, to people who were saying they would like to get VIPER because they would like the instruments and other high-value components and use them in their missions,” Kearns said. These responses led NASA to issue a more formal request for information.

NASA is currently reviewing responses to the subsequent RFI. “At the moment we are thinking about the next steps: what it would take to establish a partnership,” he said, but declined to provide further details. A NASA spokesperson said Oct. 30 that NASA was determining which responses to the RFI warranted seeking more information and “proposing next steps by early 2025.”

Kearns did not say how many responses to the RFI the agency had received, but VIPER project scientist Anthony Colaprete said at a separate conference at LEAG on Oct. 29 that NASA had received 11 responses. He added that he was “protected” from the process and had not seen any of the responses. “But I think they were kind enough to ask headquarters to step back and say, ‘OK, what do we do next?’ »

One of the reasons NASA cited in July for canceling VIPER was the expectation that the mission, which had already suffered cost increases, would likely experience additional cost overruns and delays due to problems discovered during environmental testing , which were just beginning when NASA made the cancellation decision. “I will tell you that in general, system-level environmental testing of spacecraft development reveals issues that need to be corrected, which would take more time and money,” Kearns said during the July briefing to announce the decision.

However, Colaprete said VIPER completed both the launch environmental tests and thermal vacuum tests without any major issues. “I’ve been involved in a number of thermal vacuum flight test campaigns, and this one was absolutely incredible in how it went,” he said. “Everything looks good so far.”

Current plans call for VIPER to be in long-term storage at the Johnson Space Center, where it was tested, around the start of the new year, while NASA decides what to do with the rover. “I hope we get some real guidance very soon,” he said.

Colaprete, in his presentation, seemed to add another wrinkle to the timeline of NASA’s decision to cancel VIPER. “As you all know, in January our lunar delivery plans changed,” he said. “Following the Peregrine anomalies, it was decided by headquarters that we would not fly on Griffin 1.”

This was a reference to Astrobotic’s first lunar landing mission, Peregrine, which encountered a problem with its propulsion systems hours after launch, preventing the spacecraft from attempting a moon landing. The spacecraft instead flew to lunar distances before returning to Earth and re-entry a week and a half after launch.

However, at the time of Peregrine’s loss, and for months afterward, NASA did not announce that it had removed VIPER from Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. In a briefing just after the end of the Peregrine mission, Kearns said NASA would wait for the results of the Peregrine investigation before making changes to the reward, through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, to fly VIPER on Griffin. Astrobotic published the results of this review in Augustmore than a month after NASA announced the decision to cancel VIPER.

A NASA spokesperson said Nov. 4, in response to an Oct. 30 inquiry, that the decision not to fly VIPER on Griffin was made during an end-of-mission review of the rover in late June . NASA retained the CLPS task order with Astrobotic for the Griffin mission and will fly a mass simulator or other payloads identified by Astrobotic.

In addition to NASA’s ongoing review of responses to the RFI, a reprieve for VIPER could come from Congress, which could direct and fund NASA to carry out the mission as originally planned in a spending bill of the last financial year 2025. Early September bipartisan leadership of the House Science Committee sent a letter to NASA with questions about VIPER and NASA’s decision to cancel it.

“NASA’s decision to terminate a nearly completed lunar rover and use the full value of the fixed-price contract with vendor CLPS to launch a deadweight in place of VIPER raises serious questions,” the researchers wrote. members in their letter. Questions posed to NASA in the letter range from the costs associated with VIPER to other methods NASA plans to use to collect the data the mission would have collected on water ice deposits at the lunar south pole.

Kearns said at the LEAG meeting that NASA responded to these questions in September and had not received any follow-up requests from the committee. He did not disclose details of the responses provided by NASA.

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