NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

Collecting regolith samples with a blast of gas

NASA is sending a "vacuum cleaner" to the Moon as a payload on next week's Blue Ghost 1 mission to land on the lunar surface.

The words "vacuum cleaner" are those of the US space agency. The Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) device is a NASA payload on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander. It is part of NASA's efforts to find new ways of collecting samples and performing in-situ testing.

The LPV was developed by Honeybee Robotics and works by using pressurized gas to stir up the lunar regolith into a "small tornado." The resulting dust cloud then gets funneled into a transfer tube by pneumatic jets and dumped into a sample container.

The device can handle particles of regolith measuring up to 1 cm in size, and the collected Moon dirt is then sieved, photographed in the sample container, and the findings transmitted back to Earth. The device will also test the regolith dust's adhesion and gas jets' efficiency as a cleaning agent.

It's all autonomous, although the kit could also be used with astronaut oversight on future crewed missions to the Moon or Mars.

It's a neat alternative to the mechanical scraping of the surface employed by other missions. Dennis Harris, who manages the LPV payload for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said: "There's no digging, no mechanical arm to wear out requiring servicing or replacement – it functions like a vacuum cleaner.

"The technology on this CLPS payload could benefit the search for water, helium, and other resources and provide a clearer picture of in situ materials available to NASA and its partners for fabricating lunar habitats and launch pads, expanding scientific knowledge and the practical exploration of the solar system every step of the way."

First, however, it needs to get to the Moon. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 mission is set to lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. The mission will take approximately 45 days to reach the Moon, including 25 days in orbit around the Earth, and the landing is scheduled for early March. ®