NASA selects three CLPS payloads to study Moon’s terrain, heat flow and radiation

NASA announced the selection of three new science investigations that will be delivered to the lunar surface no earlier than 2028 as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and the Artemis campaign. Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the selections “continue this pipeline of lunar exploration” and will expand knowledge about the Moon’s history and environment while informing future human safety and navigation.

The selected payloads are EMILIA-3D, which will produce three-dimensional thermal models of lunar terrain using a thermal imager and a stereo pair of visible-light cameras (principal investigator Andrew Ryan, University of Arizona); LISTER, which will drill beneath the surface to measure heat flow, temperature changes and thermal conductivity and is a follow-up to a version that flew on Blue Ghost Mission 1 (principal investigator Seiichi Nagihara, Texas Tech University); and SELINE, which will characterize surface radiation from primary galactic cosmic rays and their secondary particles and how that radiation interacts with the lunar regolith (principal investigator Drew Turner, Johns Hopkins University).

NASA said the experiments do not require specific landing sites and will be assigned to CLPS delivery task orders at a later time.

Key Topics

Science, Nasa, Clps, Artemis, Lister, Seline