What is Intrepid?
Intrepid is a long-lived lunar rover that relies on high-TRL hardware, advanced autonomy, detailed traverse pre-planning, night operations, and a disciplined concept of operations that enable the investigation of 133 major and 981 minor scientific sites throughout six diverse geologic regions. Intrepid will traverse ~1800 km over four Earth years (3-years nominal, plus 1-year margin) revealing undiscovered aspects of lunar evolution and pave the way for the next decade of planetary exploration.
The last fifty years of planetary exploration have shown that knowledge of planetary scale differentiation, global asymmetries, and thermal evolution are essential to understanding how they develop their unique characteristics. Intrepid's results, combined with global orbital observations and what we know from lunar samples, will provide for the first time a holistic picture of large scale mantle processes and the thermal evolution of a silicate body other than Earth.
The Intrepid long-range rover concept was first presented at the 2011 Lunar Exploration Analysis Group meeting. Over the next decade, technologies caught up with the concept, and NASA funded a Planetary Mission Concept Study to prove the scientific value and determine the cost of implementation as part of the NASA Science Mission Directorate Decadal Study. A diverse team of scientists1 sharpened the science focus, and engineering work was carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, culminating in a comprehensive study report. We hope you enjoy reading the report as much as we enjoyed writing it; make sure to read the appendices.
1 Carnegie Mellon University, First Mode, Honeybee Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, Lunar and Planetary Institute, Malin Space Science Systems, Stanford University, University of New Hampshire, Washington University in St. Louis
