Canada will cancel its first rover mission to the moon’s south pole as the Canadian government shifts its spending to other projects.
The water-seeking moon rover project, first announced by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) in 2021, is terminated in the department’s spending plan for 2026-27. The news comes as NASA — a major CSA partner — makes big changes to its Artemis program of lunar exploration, including putting a long-planned moon-orbiting space station on hiatus to focus on a base on the surface.
“It’s hopefully not a lost cause,” rover mission lead scientist Gordon Osinski, a professor of Earth and planetary materials at Canada’s Western University, told Space.com. “We’ve built up knowledge. I think the science team has come a long way in the last couple of years. The faculty members on it, the researchers — also all of the graduate students and postdocs — they’ll be able to take that knowledge that they’ve learned throughout their future careers.”
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