Skip to main content

NASA scientists want to send a cave-diving rover to the moon

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

More than a dozen mysterious caverns lie hundreds of feet beneath the lunar surface, and NASA is considering a plan to send an extreme-terrain rover to rappel down and explore them. The reason? Caves could hold clues to the history of the Moon. Caverns may also provide ready-made habitats for future crewed missions, sheltering astronauts from the extreme temperatures, radiation, and asteroids that periodically impact the surface.

Recommended Videos

Called Moon Diver, the rover would hitch a ride on a rocket in the mid-2020s and touch down a few hundred feet from one of the moon’s deep pits on the Sea of Tranquility basin. There, it would deploy a smaller rover, Axel, to rappel hundreds of feet into the large pits that pockmark the lunar surface, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Instruments in the rover’s wheel wells would be used to analyze the caverns, collecting data on the ancient rock beneath the surface.

Moon Diver’s Axel rover rappels into a cavern. Artist’s rendition. NASA / JPL-Caltech

Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traversed part of the Sea of Tranquility 50 years ago.

At the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 20, NASA scientists presented their plans for the mission. Laura Kerber, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher and principal investigator of the Moon Diver mission, said, “There is a nice poetry to this mission concept. Apollo 11 landed along the edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Fifty years later, we are going to dive down right into the middle of it.”

The Moon’s open caverns were formed when the ceilings collapsed into deep lava tubes under the Lunar surface. The exposed caverns would allow scientists to virtually time travel, giving them access to billion-year-old rock that could help researchers unravel the Lunar past.

To study the ancient Moon rocks, the two-wheeled Axel rover would be equipped with instruments including a variety of cameras for close-up and long-distance imaging of the walls. A microscope would be used to analyze the cavern’s mineral content. A spectrometer would analyze the chemistry of the rock.

The Moon Diver mission has been proposed as one of NASA’s low-cost missions. It will compete against proposals for missions to Neptune’s moon Triton and Jupiter’s satellite Io.

Dyllan Furness
Former Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
NASA astronaut hopes for smooth ride home after his wild ride 22 years ago
NASA astronaut Don Pettit.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit is just a couple of days away from returning to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after a seven-month stay at the International Space Station, making it the perfect time to revisit his astonishing account of his first Soyuz homecoming in 2003.

In the article, Pettit describes in vivid detail the extraordinary experience of hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere at five miles a second, and how malfunctions with Soyuz led to the flight home becoming a kind of test landing for a future crewed mission to Mars.

Read more
NASA’s moon rocket meets its side boosters for crewed Artemis II voyage
NASA's SLS rocket for the Artemis II mission.

NASA’s much-anticipated Artemis II mission has experienced multiple delays in recent years, with the agency currently targeting no earlier than February 2026 for a flight that will send four astronauts on a voyage around the moon.

The Artemis II astronauts, as well as folks following the mission preparations, will be pleased to learn that NASA recently lifted the SLS rocket’s core stage into position, joining it to the two solid rocket boosters in essential work carried out inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center.

Read more
See the first ever footage of sunset on the moon captured by Blue Ghost
Blue Ghost Mission 1 - Sunset Panorama

With the Blue Ghost lunar mission coming to an end this week, the spacecraft has gifted scientists and the public with an incredible send-off. The moon lander captured the first ever HD imagery of a sunset as seen from the moon, and the images have been stitched together into a video.

The stunning footage shows the sun setting over the moon's horizon; an event which happens on the moon just one per month. A lunar day lasts for two weeks, and the Blue Ghost used this time to perform its experiments on the moon's surface and collect solar power from the sun. Then the two-week-long lunar night begins and it is too dark for the spacecraft to collect power -- but first, the lander got to observe one last sight of the sun setting.

Read more