NASA scientists want to send a cave-diving rover to the moon

By Dyllan Furness Published April 28, 2022

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

More than a dozen mysterious caverns lie hundreds of feet beneath the lunar surface, and NASA is considering a plan to send an extreme-terrain rover to rappel down and explore them. The reason? Caves could hold clues to the history of the Moon. Caverns may also provide ready-made habitats for future crewed missions, sheltering astronauts from the extreme temperatures, radiation, and asteroids that periodically impact the surface.

Called Moon Diver, the rover would hitch a ride on a rocket in the mid-2020s and touch down a few hundred feet from one of the moon’s deep pits on the Sea of Tranquility basin. There, it would deploy a smaller rover, Axel, to rappel hundreds of feet into the large pits that pockmark the lunar surface, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Instruments in the rover’s wheel wells would be used to analyze the caverns, collecting data on the ancient rock beneath the surface.

Moon Diver’s Axel rover rappels into a cavern. Artist’s rendition. NASA / JPL-Caltech

Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traversed part of the Sea of Tranquility 50 years ago.

Recommended Videos

At the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 20, NASA scientists presented their plans for the mission. Laura Kerber, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher and principal investigator of the Moon Diver mission, said, “There is a nice poetry to this mission concept. Apollo 11 landed along the edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Fifty years later, we are going to dive down right into the middle of it.”

The Moon’s open caverns were formed when the ceilings collapsed into deep lava tubes under the Lunar surface. The exposed caverns would allow scientists to virtually time travel, giving them access to billion-year-old rock that could help researchers unravel the Lunar past.

To study the ancient Moon rocks, the two-wheeled Axel rover would be equipped with instruments including a variety of cameras for close-up and long-distance imaging of the walls. A microscope would be used to analyze the cavern’s mineral content. A spectrometer would analyze the chemistry of the rock.

The Moon Diver mission has been proposed as one of NASA’s low-cost missions. It will compete against proposals for missions to Neptune’s moon Triton and Jupiter’s satellite Io.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…

Space

Intuitive Machines to carry NASA experiments to the moon in 2027

An artist’s concept of Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander on the Moon’s South Pole.

Intuitive Machines, the company that earlier this year managed the first lunar landing by a commercial entity (partly successfully) will be returning to the moon with more NASA payloads. As part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, Intuitive Machines will design and build a lander to launch to the moon's south pole, and NASA will pay $117 million for it to carry six science payloads.

This is part of NASA's broader effort to embrace the burgeoning private space industry by becoming a customer of space companies rather than designing and building its own spacecraft. The aim is for Intuitive Machines to arrive at the moon's south pole in 2027, ahead of the Artemis missions that will see humans return to the lunar surface. The company will also be launching another lunar lander called Athena later this year, with a third launch planned next year as well.

Space

NASA reveals date for attempted return flight of troubled Starliner

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft docked at the space station.

NASA is targeting Friday, September 6, for the return flight of Boeing Space’s troubled Starliner spacecraft, the agency revealed on Thursday.

The vehicle will come home from the International Space Station (ISS) nearly three months later than originally planned and without the crew that it arrived with. The flight, the outcome of which could determine the Starliner’s future, is expected to take about six hours, NASA said in a blog post on Thursday.

Space

Another piece of NASA’s mega moon rocket ships out

Crews moved the cone-shaped launch vehicle stage adapter out of NASA Marshall’s Building 4708 to the agency’s Pegasus barge on August 21. The barge will ferry the adapter first to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, where it will pick up additional SLS hardware for future Artemis missions, and then travel to NASA Kennedy. In Florida, teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems will prepare the adapter for stacking and launch.

Even while NASA is struggling with Boeing's new crewed Starliner spacecraft, it is continuing work on another key piece of space infrastructure: its Space Launch System, or SLS rocket that is designed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond. Parts of the new rocket are arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and now another key piece is on its ways: the launch vehicle stage adapter.

Standing at 322 feet tall when fully stacked, the SLS is NASA's most powerful rocket to date and has already been on a test flight around the moon as part of the Artemis I mission in 2022. Now, NASA is preparing for its first crewed flight using the rocket, which will be the Artemis II mission scheduled for September 2025. Unlike NASA's current woes with the Starliner spacecraft, which ferries astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station, the Artemis II mission will use a different spacecraft called the Orion.