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July 18 news, due to rising costs, NASA (NASA) canceled its VIPERLunar RoverExploration plan.

VIPER stands for Volatiles of Polar InvestigationExploration Rover"Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover" was originally planned to land near the South Pole of the Moon and spend 100 days searching forWater IceThis mission is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative (CLPS) and is expected to be completed in 2025 via Astrobotic Griffin.LanderVIPER will now likely be disassembled or possibly sold to industry.

NASA announced the decision to terminate the VIPER mission in a conference call held on Wednesday local time. It is estimated that canceling the project will save NASA an additional $84 million in development costs. So far, NASA has invested about $450 million in the project, excluding launch costs.

Although the project was canceled, NASA leadership stressed that the project has been successful so far and the cancellation was purely due to budget considerations.

"We have great confidence in the VIPER team," said Joel Kearns, associate administrator for exploration at NASA Headquarters. "The issue really comes down to cost and the current tight budget environment in the United States."

“First and foremost, this is in no way a reflection on the quality of the work of the mission team,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “They have been working diligently, even during a pandemic, to build this rover to search for water ice on the Moon.”

"This was a difficult decision based solely on budgetary considerations in this very constrained budget environment," Fox added at the end of the call.

At the time the program was canceled, the VIPER rover had been fully assembled and was undergoing environmental testing to ensure it could withstand the tremendous stress of launch and the harsh environment of space.

Kearns said NASA is currently considering "possibly disassembling and reusing VIPER's scientific instruments and components for future lunar missions," but will first ask U.S. and international industry partners if they are interested in using the rover as is.

Although the VIPER program has ended, NASA still believes that the same scientific goals can be achieved through future lunar exploration programs.

For example, NASA's upcoming Lunar Terrain Vehicle is designed not only for astronauts to use on the lunar surface, but can also be remotely operated, giving it the ability to explore the permanently shadowed area near the moon's south pole in search of frozen water.

In addition, other lunar landers may also be able to deliver instruments similar to the VIPER rover to the same area. "We are exploring the possibility of sending instruments to permanently shadowed regions via CLPS landers or having CLPS landers provide some kind of mobility to bring instruments to permanently shadowed regions," Kearns said in a conference call.

He added: "We are therefore confident that over time we will be able to achieve the science goals that were originally set for VIPER."

NASA has had to make tough decisions on many other ambitious science projects in the face of a budget cut for fiscal year 2025. Fox said today that the total budget for NASA's science projects will be reduced by $1 billion by 2025. Fox said in another conference call on NASA's budget in March that this forced NASA's Science Mission Directorate to "have to make some very difficult choices."

Other projects facing difficult choices could have a profound impact on NASA's science and astronomy missions. For example, the future of the Chandra X-ray Telescope is very uncertain because its budget has been drastically cut from $41.1 million in 2025 to $5.2 million in 2029. In addition, the Mars sample return program is currently looking for alternative operating plans as costs have soared to more than $11 billion and caused strong dissatisfaction in Congress. (Chenchen)