Voyager's Griffin-1 Lander Cleared for 455 kg Lunar Delivery After JPL Trials

Voyager Technologies' Griffin-1 lunar lander has finished a battery of ground trials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, clearing the way for a launch planned later this year. The testing wrapped up ahead of a mission to deliver cargo to a site near the lunar south pole.

The Environmental Test Laboratory ran the lander through extreme temperatures, heavy vibration and the acoustic noise generated between launch and landing. JPL announced that the spacecraft passed the full series of tests. An Aug. 31 image shows the vehicle inside JPL's 25-foot-wide space simulator.

Griffin Mission One will fly under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The mission is designed to carry more than 1,100 pounds, or 455 kilograms, of cargo to the moon's surface. That manifest includes science experiments, technology demonstrations and Astrolab's FLIP rover, which will traverse the terrain carrying a supercomputer.

Charles Whetsel, who manages JPL's Exploration Systems Development Office, said the laboratory has been testing robotic explorers since the Ranger program of the mid-1960s, the effort that produced NASA's first close-up images of the lunar surface. "We're proud to provide our expertise and facilities to support this new phase of commercial lunar exploration," he said.

NASA aims to build a crewed moon base near the lunar south pole over the next five years or so, and the work done by Griffin-1 is intended to support that goal.