NASA may send a backup, nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon
NASA may send a backup, nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon
NASA 可能会将备用的核动力火星车送往月球
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 “Promise,” 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) to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. NASA’s other rovers primarily operate on solar power.
NASA 官员周二表示，他们正在认真考虑将“毅力号”（Perseverance）火星车的全尺寸工程模型送往月球，以加快其探索月球南极区域的步伐。该工程模型目前存放于加州的喷气推进实验室（JPL），绰号为“Promise”，此前作为“毅力号”的测试平台，并未有发射计划。若送往月球，它将配备一台多任务放射性同位素热电发生器（MMRTG），为其在复杂地形和月球长夜中的运行提供动力。NASA 的其他月球车主要依靠太阳能运行。
“We are thinking very hard right now about sending Promise to the Moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday during a monthly update on the agency’s plans to build a Moon base.
“我们目前正在认真考虑将‘Promise’送往月球，”NASA 局长贾里德·艾萨克曼（Jared Isaacman）在周二关于该机构月球基地建设规划的月度更新会议上表示。
“An awesome capability”
“一项了不起的能力”
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’s Blue Moon lander or SpaceX’s Starship due to its size. Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, 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.
NASA 手头现有一台 MMRTG，以及正在衰变的钚-238 燃料。由于这台重约 1 吨的火星车体积较大，很可能需要通过蓝色起源（Blue Origin）的“蓝月”着陆器或 SpaceX 的“星舰”进行运送。艾萨克曼与另一位负责月球基地计划的 NASA 官员卡洛斯·加西亚-加兰（Carlos García-Galán）对利用现有硬件为月球计划带来新能力的可能性感到非常兴奋。
“That would be an awesome capability,” García-Galán said. “For 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’t 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.”
“这将是一项了不起的能力，”加西亚-加兰说。“对于月球任务目标而言，搭载核动力 RTG 意味着我们可以不受光照限制，前往任何想去的地方。在月球上生存过夜是最大的挑战之一，而有了这项能力，我们就不必担心这个问题了。因此，就像‘好奇号’和‘毅力号’在火星表面所展示的那样，进行长距离穿越并进入那些极难到达的区域，那将是非常棒的。”
No longer needed as a test bed?
不再需要作为测试平台了吗？
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 “Mars yard” 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. Perseverance launched to Mars in July 2020, and its predecessor, the similarly sized Curiosity rover, launched to the red planet in November 2011.
多年来，“Promise”一直作为“毅力号”在火星上可能遇到的问题的测试平台。在向火星表面的火星车发送指令之前，这些指令通常会先在加州实验室的“火星场”中通过该车辆进行测试。它还有助于确保“毅力号”能够安全穿越火星上的不同区域。“毅力号”于 2020 年 7 月发射升空，其前身是尺寸相近的“好奇号”火星车，于 2011 年 11 月发射前往红色星球。
“It makes sense, early on, when we’ve got a problem that we might want to test it out here before we upload it to Mars,” Isaacman said. “But we’ve had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we’ve got this hardware that the taxpayers invested a lot in. So the question was posed, what if we sent it to the Moon?”
“在早期阶段，当我们遇到问题时，先在这里进行测试再上传到火星是很有意义的，”艾萨克曼说。“但我们现在已经有了多年在火星表面操作两台火星车的经验，而且我们拥有这台纳税人投入巨资打造的硬件。所以有人提出了一个问题：如果我们把它送到月球会怎样？”
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’s interests in understanding the environment where it wants to establish a long-term human presence.
尽管火星车是为在火星表面运行而设计的，但 JPL 的工程师表示，“Promise”可以经过改装以适应月球环境。NASA 还需要对车上的科学仪器进行一些调整，但艾萨克曼表示，这是一种创造性的方式，可以推进该机构在了解其希望建立长期人类驻留点的环境方面的利益。
“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.
“我们拥有硬件，而这正是我们应该努力去做的事情，通过将‘Promise’这样的能力带到月球表面，从而取得成功，”他说。
Could do a lot of useful science
可以进行许多有用的科学研究
There are many useful scientific and exploration objectives a rover like this could accomplish. NASA studied these questions a little more than a decade ago with an “Endurance” rover proposal that would have traveled nearly 2,000 km across the South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the Moon. It was never built.
像这样的火星车可以完成许多有用的科学和探索目标。十多年前，NASA 曾通过一项“耐力号”（Endurance）火星车提案研究过这些问题，该提案计划穿越月球背面南极-艾特肯盆地近 2000 公里。但该计划最终未被实施。
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’s mandate to return to the Moon and to build a surface base. The space agency is effectively on a wartime footing as it seeks to accelerate plans to land humans on the Moon’s south pole before China and to explore the most interesting terrain there first. Mars is not a near-term priority.
这一决定尚未最终确定，NASA 仍在评估将“Promise”作为其月球探测主力军的可行性。然而，周二的公告强调，艾萨克曼及其团队正在 NASA 内部搜寻硬件和其他工具，以推进该机构重返月球并建立月球表面基地的使命。该航天机构实际上已进入“战时状态”，力求加速计划，争取在竞争对手中国之前将人类送上月球南极，并率先探索那里最有趣的区域。火星目前并非短期优先事项。
“It’s quite symbolic, in a way, the harvesting up what’s left of the Mars program and shipping it to the Moon,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society.
“从某种意义上说，将火星计划的剩余资产收集起来并运往月球，这具有相当的象征意义，”行星学会（The Planetary Society）空间政策主管凯西·德雷尔（Casey Dreier）表示。