WASHINGTON — Converting an engineering model of a Mars rover into an actual lunar rover could cost NASA more than $1 billion, an estimate strongly rejected by the agency’s administrator.
NASA announced June 30 it was considering sending to the moon a rover it called PROMISE, or Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration. PROMISE would be based on engineering models of the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers currently used on Earth to help plan rover operations and diagnose problems.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the event where he announced PROMISE that the rover was part of efforts to “raid the pantry at every one of our centers for payloads” that could be used to support its lunar base efforts. “We are thinking very hard right now about sending PROMISE to the moon.”
“We’ve 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,” he said. “I think we’ll probably make some adjustments to some of the instruments that are on it. It is going to bring an immense capability to the lunar south pole in short order.”
At the briefing, neither Isaacman nor Carlos García-Galán, NASA program executive for Moon Base, offered a price estimate for converting the Mars rover engineering model into PROMISE, but suggested it could be done relatively quickly and inexpensively because of the existing hardware.
