A plan to turn an engineering copy of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover into a lunar rover called PROMISE could cost between $723 million and $1.33 billion, The Planetary Society has estimated. A launch is unlikely before the early 2030s.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman publicly disputed those figures, saying that if costs reached even 20 percent of the lower estimate the mission would not go ahead.
PROMISE, short for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration, would repurpose a Perseverance engineering model currently used on Earth for testing. The Planetary Society said the rover lacks space-certified communications and scientific instruments and would need adaptation for the lunar surface.
Power supply is a key challenge. Perseverance runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator powered by plutonium-238, and NASA has only one spare unit. The Planetary Society warned that using it for PROMISE could block future outer-planet missions that rely on the same power source.
Isaacman argued that the agency must use hardware into which hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have already been invested rather than leave it idle. He added that plutonium-238 loses about 2 percent of its power each year through natural radioactive decay, making it impractical to hold the generator in reserve for missions that do not yet exist.
