Moon Monday #243: An Amazon delivery for NASA’s VIPER rover?

NASA’s planned lunar-water-studying VIPER rover mission, whose launch fate has been uncertain for over a year now, has gotten a new hope to cling to with the agency’s latest announcement of awarding a potential contract to Blue Origin for delivering the rover to the Moon’s south pole in late 2027. The Jeff Bezos owned Blue Origin is preparing two of its “Mark I” robotic lunar landers for launch, with the first one targeted to fly later this year. If this first flight goes well, and if Blue Origin can separately demonstrate to NASA how the lander’s mechanisms should safely deploy the 450-kilogram VIPER rover onto the lunar surface post landing, NASA will award Blue a $190 million contract for delivering VIPER to the Moon on the second Mark I lander. The contract will be part of the NASA’s CLPS program.

Notably, the announcement also states that NASA will itself conduct operations and science planning of the VIPER rover as opposed to the agency’s prior considerations when it tried finding a private company to both fly and operate the rover at the latter’s own cost—an approach many argued decidedly failed at VIPER’s original goal. It’s good of NASA to not have followed that path and instead retain VIPER science execution with itself.

The Mark I landers are large in size, on the same scale as the Apollo landers, and yet the first one is carrying only two small NASA payloads, representing a low value bet for the agency despite the higher risk postures that CLPS orders are supposed to accept. I elaborated on this aspect earlier in Moon Monday #226 (May 2025):

Note that the Mark I lander has a large payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms. That’s more than the entire fueled mass of smaller landers like Firefly’s Blue Ghost and India’s Chandrayaan 3! And yet NASA hasn’t stated any plans to fly any other scientific instruments on either of the two Mark I flights. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, and that the Mark I’s landing site is the lunar south pole, it would be remiss for NASA to skip flying any lunar water related payloads on the Mark Is as a bare minimum. Whether that be through Artemis, CLPS, or other funding sources does not ultimately matter.

And thus I’m glad that at least for the second Mark I flight, NASA has gone ahead with the intention of flying VIPER onboard, with what is perhaps the most apt payload for Blue and the US at this juncture. Let’s hope VIPER’s resource prospecting mission finally actually happens.

Upcoming missions globally which are similar to VIPER—also aiming to find and characterize the nature of lunar water at the lunar south pole—include China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft as well as the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission. These missions will also provide context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028.

Related: Hope in desolation (verses) 🌙

Chandrayaan 3 research updates

ISRO is seeking competitive proposals from the national scientific community to study Chandrayaan 3 lander, rover, and orbiter data with support in the form of partial funding, infrastructure access, data analysis help, and conference attendance aid. It was a year after the landing in August 2023 that ISRO finally made available an initial set of peer-reviewed Chandrayaan 3 payload data online, accessible by anyone after free registration. ISRO’s data portal, called Pradan ISSDC, is compliant with NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS). And so just as with the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, Chandrayaan 3 data is available in the latest PDS4 format for international researchers to easily utilize it. The latest announcement is specifically for Indian researchers nationwide who may have good ideas but would benefit from ISRO’s institutional support. It’s a good step in growing India’s nascent planetary science community.

Relatedly, I’ve compiled below notable research outcomes from Chandrayaan 3.

• Results from the thermal probe experiment on the Chandrayaan 3 lander have expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions.
• The Chandrayaan 3 rover lunar soil composition measurements contributed to knowledge of our Moon’s origin, and it may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when analyzing local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
• Researchers have been using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s high-resolution camera, which is the world’s sharpest lunar imager, to identify sub-resolution tracks of Chandrayaan 3’s rover based on illumination changes. Scientists are also using the imager to study interactions between the lander’s engine plumes and lunar regolith during when Chandrayaan 3’s lander hopped towards the end of its surface mission.
• The Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module (orbiter) observed Earth as an exoplanet.
• The first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region reveals it to be 3.7 billion years old. The region has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections.
• The composition of high-latitude lunar soil measured by the Chandrayaan 3 rover is being used to create lunar soil simulants from Moon-like anorthositic rocks in the UAE—whose second lunar rover is flying on Firefly’s second lander with a targeted launch next year.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Marc Rayman for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More Moon

• NASA has made notable safety improvements to the next SLS rocket which will launch the Orion spacecraft hosting four astronauts towards the Moon for the Artemis II mission:

The Artemis II rocket includes an improved navigation system compared to Artemis I.  Its communications capability also has been improved by repositioning antennas on the rocket to ensure continuous communications with NASA ground stations and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 which controls launches along the Eastern Range. An emergency detection system on the ICPS [upper stage] allows the rocket to sense and respond to problems and notify the crew. The flight safety system adds a time delay to the self-destruct system to allow time for Orion’s escape system to pull the capsule to safety in event of an abort.

• NASA is preparing to demonstrate 4G/LTE on the Moon during the Artemis III crewed lunar surface exploration mission with the aim of streaming high-definition video and audio from astronauts as they explore first hand the strange new world that is the lunar polar terrain.
• The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) highlighted an interesting paper recently related to lunar rover testing:

Explaining why rovers get stuck in sand in low-gravity environments, like the Moon and Mars, requires understanding how sand grains themselves interact in low gravity. “On Earth, sand is more rigid and supportive—reducing the likelihood it will shift under a vehicle’s wheels. But the moon’s surface is “fluffier” and therefore shifts more easily—meaning rovers have less traction, which can hinder their mobility.” Computational models of sand in lower gravity (using the open source Project Chrono simulation engine) show that gravitational offsets (suspension systems) or light-weighted rover models during terrestrial testing are insufficient to predict how wheels will actually behave on arrival (paper).

Fly me to the Moon!

I’m giving a talk with Q&A on the history and future of lunar exploration this Sunday, September 28, in Bangalore. Bring all your questions about the Moon and how we’re exploring it worldwide! You can book tickets online. The event is offline-only to make the audience comfortable in engaging freely with their curiosities. (Note: My honorarium for the talk is fixed regardless of the tickets sold so there are no commission incentives for sharing this.)