Gallery: A look at NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Deliveries

The Astrobotic Technology Griffin Lander, illustrated here, will carry NASA payloads for the Volatiles Investigation Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission, also known as TO 20A. VIPER is a rover expected to land sometime in late 2024. It will conduct a 100-day mission to explore resources on the Moon. The 625-kg lander has seven main engines and four clusters of attitude control thrusters to control its orientation. 

This artist’s concept illustrates VIPER, a rover payload on the Astrobotic Technology Griffin Lander planned for delivery in late 2024 that will locate surface and subsurface volatiles, or substances that vaporize easily, across a variety of thermal environments. The payload will then excavate and analyze samples of the regolith containing the volatile materials. The rover, developed by NASA's Ames Research Center, is optimized for lunar regions that have short nights and is the first NASA rover equipped with headlights to offer sight in dark areas. Its camera system allows operators on Earth the ability to see the terrain and send commands in near-real time, and the rover can move in nearly every direction, including in circles and sideways.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center developed this laser retroreflector, which is used in multiple CLPS missions, including VIPER, the Astrobotic Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines' Missions 1 and 2. LRA is a passive optical instrument that bounces light that shines on it directly backward. The instrument consists of eight retroreflectors embedded in an aluminum hemisphere that is mounted to the lander deck, enabling the device to retroreflect laser light emitted from various directions. This payload would function as a permanent marker on the surface of the moon, and allows for precise measurements of the distance between landing or orbiting spacecraft and the LRA.

The neuron spectrometer system (NSS), developed by NASA's Ames Research Center and Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, assesses the hydrogen abundance up to three feet below the lunar surface along the path of NASA’s VIPER payload on Astrobotic Technology's Griffin Lander. Instead of detecting hydrogen from orbit, NSS provides more accurate readings by measuring the energy and number of neutrons that present as radiation, which are then used to infer the amount of hydrogen in the soil. NSS will also be a payload on the Astrobotic Technology Peregrine Lander scheduled for delivery sometime later this year.

NASA awarded Firefly Aerospace a $93.3 million contract in 2021 and a $112 million contract in 2023 for two separate CLPS deliveries scheduled for 2024 and 2026 respectively. Both missions, TO 19D and TO CS-3, will use Firefly's Blue Ghost Lander, depicted here, which has a payload capacity of 155 kg. It will deliver 10 NASA-sponsored payloads to the lunar surface in 2024 as part of Blue Ghost Mission 1 and will return in 2026 to deliver payloads to the far side of the Moon and into lunar orbit.

RadPC is a radiation tolerant computer system developed by Montana State University that will be delivered to the Moon on the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Lander, or TO19D delivery, that will provide detailed radiation information about the lunar landing site. The computer has a set of false mitigation strategies that allows it to recover from single event effects caused by ionizing radiation. The payload consists of the computer, which runs a comprehensive test program and instrumentation on its state, as well as three dosimeters, or detectors that measure the ionizing radiation that provide radiation information about the landing site.

RAC is a dust collector and detector payload on the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Lander that will measure the accumulation rates of lunar regolith on several different surfaces like solar cells, optimal systems, coatings and sensors to determine how well the materials can repel or shed lunar regolith. Aegis Aerospace, Inc. led the development for this payload, which is made up of a collection of panels with different materials that will be exposed to the regolith. Thirty samples have been provided, including titanium, thermal control paint, a dust collection disk and Kapton. RAC’s data will assist in the effort to make spacecraft, habitats and suits more resistant to abrasion.

The Lunar Environment Heliophysics X-ray Imager developed by Boston University is a soft X-ray imager scheduled for delivery in 2024 on the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Lander. Instead of studying the Moon itself, LEXI will look at Earth from the lunar surface and image the planet's magnetosheath and magnetopause from a wide field of view with its nine lobster-eye optical elements. LEXI's images will focus on studying how Earth's magnetic field interacts with charged particles from the sun's solar wind and will measure the photons that emitted from the exchange of charges.

NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $77.5 million contract in 2021 for Intuitive Machines 3, a delivery scheduled for 2024 to Reiner Gamma, a lunar swirl on the Moon's surface. The Nova-C lander, shown here, will carry four NASA payloads, including mobile robots, a data relay satellite and secondary payloads that are yet to be determined. The lander is capable of carrying 100-130 kg of payload and will carry roughly 92 kg of payload to the lunar surface.

This artist’s concept depicts LVx, a lander and rover payload suite on TOCP-11, the Intuitive Machines Nova-C Lander, that will investigate the origin of lunar swirls and their relation to the Moon’s magnetic field and solar wind. Lunar swirls often coincide with magnetic anomalies on the Moon, but it is currently unknown why lunar swirls form or what they are. The rover, which was developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Nova-C lander, will both be equipped with magnetometers and an ion-electron plasma spectrometer. LVx will also implement a multispectral microscope, and Nova-C will have multiple cameras.

CADRE robots are autonomous mobile robots on the Intuitive Machines Nova-C Lander as part of the CP-11 delivery that are about the size of a shoebox made to explore the lunar surface. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built this set of robots with an onboard computer, wireless radio and stereo camera to sense the environment around them and capture 3D images. The robots will also be able to make scientific measurements with a Ground Penetrating Radar payload that each is equipped with.