Most of NASA’s first Moon-base robots will depend on solar power, which makes the two-week lunar night one of the whole project’s nastiest problems — but NASA is now considering an odd workaround: sending PROMISE, a JPL engineering twin of its nuclear-powered Mars rovers, to the lunar south pole.

The first hard problem for a Moon base is not building something that works in sunlight. It is building something that still works when sunlight disappears. Most early lunar surface systems are expected to lean heavily on solar power. That makes sense: sunlight is available, solar arrays are mature, and carrying fuel from Earth is [...] The post Most of NASA’s first Moon-base robots will depend on solar power, which makes the two-week lunar night one of the whole project’s nastiest problems — bu