{"id":43956,"date":"2026-07-01T22:28:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-may-send-a-backup-nuclear-powered-mars-rover-to-the-moon\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T22:28:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:28:16","slug":"nasa-may-send-a-backup-nuclear-powered-mars-rover-to-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-may-send-a-backup-nuclear-powered-mars-rover-to-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA may send a backup, nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region.<\/p>\n<p style=\"\">The car-sized rover nicknamed \u201cPromise,\u201d which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and was not otherwise planned for a launch, would land equipped with a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG)&nbsp;to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. NASA\u2019s other rovers primarily operate on solar power.<\/p>\n<p><iframe allow=\"autoplay; attribution-reporting 'src' https:\/\/cm.teads.tv\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"native\" id=\"teads-native-iframe\" sandbox=\"allow-same-origin allow-scripts\" style=\"margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 100% !important; height: 385px; border: none; overflow: hidden; display: block; float: none;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are thinking very hard right now about sending Promise to the Moon,\u201d NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday during a monthly update on the agency\u2019s plans to build a Moon base.<\/p>\n<h2>\u201cAn awesome capability\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>NASA has an MMRTG available, with a supply of Plutonium-238 that is just decaying away. It is likely the rover, with a mass of about 1 ton, would need to be delivered by Blue Origin\u2019s Blue Moon lander or SpaceX\u2019s Starship due to its size.<\/p>\n<p>Isaacman and Carlos Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n, another NASA official spearheading the Moon base initiative, were clearly fired up about the possibility of using existing hardware to bring new capabilities to the lunar program.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat would be an awesome capability,\u201d Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n said. \u201cFor Moon-based objectives, having a nuclear RTG on it allows us to go anywhere we want, regardless of the illumination. Surviving the lunar night is going to be one of the bigger challenges with this capability, we wouldn\u2019t have to worry about that. So, long traverses getting into those very hard-to-reach areas, just like Curiosity and Perseverance have shown us on the surface of Mars, that would be awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>No longer needed as a test bed?<\/h2>\n<p>Over the years, Promise has served as a test bed for problems that Perseverance might encounter on Mars. Commands are often tested on this vehicle in the \u201cMars yard\u201d at the California laboratory before similar commands are sent to the rover on the surface of Mars. It has also helped ensure Perseverance can safely traverse various areas on Mars.<\/p>\n<p>,<\/p>\n<p>Perseverance launched to Mars in July 2020, and its predecessor, the similarly sized Curiosity rover, launched to the red planet in November 2011.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt makes sense, early on, when we\u2019ve got a problem that we might want to test it out here before we upload it to Mars,\u201d Isaacman said. \u201cBut we\u2019ve had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we\u2019ve got this hardware that the taxpayers invested a lot in. So the question was posed, what if we sent it to the Moon?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although the Mars rovers were designed to operate on the surface of Mars, the JPL engineers said Promise could be modified to work on the Moon. NASA will also need to make some adjustments to the scientific instruments aboard the vehicle, but Isaacman said this represents a creative way to advance the agency\u2019s interests in understanding the environment where it wants to establish a long-term human presence.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve got the hardware, and this is exactly what we should be trying to do to put wins on the board, getting a capability like Promise to the surface of the Moon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<h2>Could do a lot of useful science<\/h2>\n<p>There are many useful scientific and exploration objectives a rover like this could accomplish. NASA studied these questions less than a decade ago with an \u201cEndurance\u201d rover proposal that would have traveled nearly 2,000 km across the South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the Moon (see this large PDF&nbsp;file for more information). It was never built.<\/p>\n<p>This decision is not final, and NASA is still assessing the feasibility of using Promise as a mainstay of its lunar fleet. However, the announcement on Tuesday underscores that Isaacman and his team are scouring NASA for hardware and other tools to advance the agency\u2019s mandate to return to the Moon and to build a surface base.<\/p>\n<p>The space agency is effectively on a wartime footing as it seeks to accelerate plans to land humans on the Moon\u2019s south pole before China and to explore the most interesting terrain there first. Mars is not a near-term priority.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s quite symbolic, in a way, the harvesting up what\u2019s left of the Mars program and shipping it to the Moon,\u201d said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region. The car-sized rover nicknamed \u201cPromise,\u201d which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1714,625,700,190,1633,21],"class_list":["post-43956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-mars-rover","tag-moon","tag-moon-base","tag-nasa","tag-perseverance","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}