Rover Searches California Desert for Water to Simulate Future Lunar Missions

Water is critical for human existence, whether on our planet or distant destinations. In support of future space exploration, researchers from NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California, are searching for water closer to home -- in the desert near the Mojave National Preserve in Southern California.

The Mojave Volatiles Prospector (MVP) project team will remotely operate a planetary rover, named K-REX, developed and managed at Ames, to determine how moisture varies across surface and subsurface soil types. Collectively, the rover and a suite of tools housed on the rover, are being integrated to mature technology concepts into better designed and built systems for prospecting materials in permanently shadowed regions on the moon.

“Because the Mojave is extremely dry like the moon, the test makes it a great analog to future lunar polar rover missions. We'll be studying water distributions in the Mojave with a rover in order to learn how to study water distributions on the moon with a rover,” said Jennifer Heldmann, principal investigator for MVP at NASA Ames.