Vice President Mike Pence addresses employees at the Vertical Motion Simulator high bay at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley on Nov. 14, 2019.
During his visit to Ames, the vice president took a tour of the center that featured highlights of facilities and projects critical to the Artemis program. These included the Vertical Motion Simulator, the world’s largest flight simulator, which could help prepare the next astronauts to land on the Moon; the Arc Jet Complex, NASA’s high-energy wind tunnel for testing materials and designs to protect spacecraft from intense heating when entering an atmosphere; and the VIPER mission – short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover – that will send a prospecting rover to the Moon to map out the location and concentration of water ice at the lunar south pole.
Image credit: NASA/Donald Richey