NASA is thinking about sending the spare Perseverance rover to the Moon. Not Mars. The Moon.
The rover, nicknamed “Promise,” is a full-scale engineering model sitting at JPL in California. It was never meant to launch. It is essentially a testbed for Perseverance.
But NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says they are looking hard at this. The idea is to equip Promise with a nuclear power source — a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) — and send it to explore the lunar south pole.
Why the Moon instead of Mars? Because the Moon is the priority right now. NASA is effectively racing China to land humans on the south pole. Mars can wait.
“We have got the hardware, and this is exactly what we should be trying to do to put wins on the board,” Isaacman said.
Promise would be car-sized and nuclear-powered, able to traverse difficult terrain and survive the two-week lunar night. That is something NASA’s solar-powered rovers cannot do.
There is precedent. A similar concept called Endurance was proposed years ago — a nearly 2,000 km traverse across the far side of the Moon. It never got built.
This is not final. NASA is still studying feasibility. But the symbolism is hard to miss. Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society put it bluntly: “Harvesting up what is left of the Mars program and shipping it to the Moon.”
If this happens, Promise becomes a lunar rover. A backup that found a mission.
