Voyager's Griffin-1 Lander Passes NASA JPL Environmental Tests for Year-End Moon Cargo Run

A Voyager Technologies lander has come through a round of testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Griffin Mission One, also called Griffin-1, completed a series of environmental trials at JPL in Southern California, the laboratory announced recently. Engineers ran the spacecraft through extreme temperatures, heavy vibration and the loud acoustic conditions it will encounter between launch and landing. An Aug. 31 image shows the lander inside JPL's 25-foot-wide space simulator. The trials are part of preparations for a launch planned for later this year.

Charles Whetsel, who manages JPL's Exploration Systems Development Office, said the laboratory's Environmental Test Laboratory has been running robotic explorers through their paces since the Ranger program. Ranger produced NASA's first close-up views of the moon's surface in the mid-1960s. "We're proud to provide our expertise and facilities to support this new phase of commercial lunar exploration," Whetsel said.

The lander flies under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It is designated to carry more than 1,100 pounds of cargo, or 455 kilograms, to a landing site near the lunar south pole. That cargo includes science experiments and hardware for testing on the moon, among them Astrolab's FLIP rover, which will carry a supercomputer while it moves across the terrain.

NASA has said the work will support a crewed moon base near the lunar south pole, which the agency aims to build over the next five years or so.