From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.

On episode 396, NASA project scientists Maria Banks and Sue Lederer revisit recent Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions and discuss research on the Moon. This episode was recorded July 17, 2025.

Transcript

Gary Jordan

Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 396: Lunar Surface Research. I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today on this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more.

NASA’s Commercial lunar payload services or CLPS, is an initiative to enable uncrewed commercial spacecraft to land on the lunar surface instead of carrying people, the spacecraft carries scientific instruments, and to get there, US companies have to design, develop and operate these spacecrafts. On this podcast, we’ve talked about CLPS a number of times, namely, ahead of the launches earlier this year, we previewed two of the CLPS flights that landed on the moon, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, or BGM1, and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 on episodes 367 and 373, respectively. We talked about the mission and the science on board, and how once on the surface, the spacecraft and flight control teams on the ground would transition to surface operations to look after vehicle health, activate payloads and downlink some precious scientific data.

On this episode, we’ll revisit these missions and share the story of the work after landing on the moon. What exactly happened during these operations, and how did they differ from our expectations, and what did we learn? Returning to the podcast to walk us through these topics, we have NASA project scientist for BGM1, Maria Banks and Sue Lederer, NASA project scientist for IM-2, they each share just what it is we’re up to on the moon and why it’s of scientific value. With that, here’s Maria Banks and Sue Lederer.

Enjoy.

Gary Jordan

Sue and Maria, thank you both for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. Maria, we missed you by this much. We almost had you right across the table, but, but you’re remote today, and that’s okay. I wish you could be here with us.

Maria Banks

Oh, I wish I was with you there too. I some severe weather canceled my flight to Houston a couple days in a row. So sorry, I didn’t quite make it to Houston.

Gary Jordan

No, so close, but we all got together, and we’re all going to take a step back to relive some of these exciting moments that you guys got to be a part of. So far on the podcast, we have talked about the missions as they are coming up, and getting excited for the mission and excited for the science, but you did the missions and you did the science, right? And so we get to actually go back and relive these exciting moments of landing on the moon and talk about the great things that were actually done during what’s called surface operations. So why don’t we take a step back? Sue Maria, both of you were on the podcast before sue for IM-1 and IM-2 for uh, Maria for blue ghost mission one. So let’s just reintroduce you back to the podcast, just so our listeners can get re familiarized with you. Sue, why don’t you give us a start? Because you were on for like I said, both IM-1 and IM-2, we got to talk about some of the exciting things. But what have you been up to since IM-2?

Sue Lederer

So for me, in the last year, I’ve been able to support not just IM-1 and IM-2, but also the first Astrobotic mission, as well as helping Maria with the Firefly mission. So we’ve now have four commercial missions from three different vendors, which has been incredible. They’ve all been so capable and really a lot of fun to work with.

Gary Jordan

That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s right, you supported a little bit of everything. And Maria, how about yourself since, since you came on to introduce us to Blue Ghost Mission 1.

Maria Banks

Yes. So yeah, as Sue said, we support each other on our different missions. So I’ve had the pleasure of working on Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines Mission 1 and Blue Ghost. And then I was I was prepared to assist with Intuitive Machines Mission 2. But then our missions ended up overlapping, so I had to stay behind in Austin, but very happily focusing on Blue Ghost Mission 1. So since we last talked, I had the pleasure of helping everyone get that mission from launch through to the end, and now working with the payloads on as they archive their data and complete their analysis, and have had the opportunity to talk to the public and several different conferences and meetings, both virtually and in person, to share some of our preliminary results and setting up some more talks off into the future. So really happy to be sharing this with the community and the public.

Gary Jordan

Perfect. You both did so much work, and I know it doesn’t stop there, right? So we can talk about some of the other missions that we have coming up very soon, right? Because we’re not, we’re not done with CLPS, but let’s, let’s go back and actually talk about what this is CLPS. So just to refresh our audience, I’m sure that we’ve had a number of different episodes on this topic, but just to refresh our audience, Sue, if you don’t mind kicking us off for just what is commercial lunar payload services?

Sue Lederer

Sure thing. So commercial lunar payload services is really something that’s designed to help grow our commercial economy, so that industry within the United States can grow a presence for having these missions flown, not just by NASA, but by the companies within the United States. So it’s really exciting for us, because we can not just do things the way that NASA does, but the commercial companies have a little bit more leeway and flexibility to allow for a little bit more innovation in a way that helps us to advance things faster than we otherwise would have. So it’s been really great for us to be able to take the risks understand that sometimes it doesn’t land exactly perfectly, but the amount of knowledge that we gain from these commercial companies taking on this risk with us as a partner has really helped us to better understand how to advance science and advance technology much faster than if we’re just simply conservative.

Gary Jordan

I’m sure, with both of you being having a science background, I mean, of course there’s the fostering the economy part, but really what you want is more science, more access to science on the moon. And here we are, right of you know, we have, we have taken these risks and working with commercial partners, but just in a very short time, we’ve landed on the moon three times, right?

Sue Lederer

So indeed. So the way that this works with clips is for us to do a NASA mission, we would generally have a mission go to the moon maybe once in a decade. And instead, we’re at this pace of having one in two landings a year. So we’re getting, you know, a lot more for our money and having dozens and dozens of payloads getting all kinds of different science instead of just a few instruments on one mission.

Gary Jordan

And we’re going to talk about a lot of those instruments. But you know, you talk about, we want to do more science, yay. We’re going to do science on the moon. But exactly what is so fascinating about the moon, Marie, I’m going to toss this one to you.

Maria Banks

Sure thing! The moon. Oh, don’t get me started! I mean, just on just a high level, the moon, it’s really a cornerstone for solar system science and exoplanet studies on so understanding the moon, it helps us understand other planets and. Including our own Earth, how they’ve evolved, the processes that shape their surfaces. Of course, it helps us also understand the influence of the moon has had on the earth, the record of the of the sun, and it serves as a platform to study the rest of the universe. So by using this moon, using our moon, our closest neighbor, use it as a testing ground for robotics and instrument systems. We can use that to further human exploration and also not only to the moon, but to the rest of the solar system and to Mars. So we can leverage this human exploration infrastructure and resources to support and advance our ability to conduct remote field geology and other science investigations with both crew and our robotic assets.

Gary Jordan 

That’s right. So there’s the practical application of learning exactly about surface operations. There’s there’s the component of just learning about the moon and its formation and how it how, how this, how the formation of the Earth was, and of and of the moon. There’s so much, so much that can be explored here. There’s and there’s a lot of different goals. I want to jump over and relive some of the moments, though, that you got to experience. So you just talked about, you know, Blue Ghost Mission 1, IM-2. I’m drawing these hard lines, but you’re supporting each other, right? Let’s jump over to, let’s jump to Blue Ghost Mission 1, Maria, and if you can take us to the moment of, I guess, prepare from, from the last time we talked about preparing for that mission, if you can take us through the flight of Blue Ghost all the way through landing and what You were doing to support the mission.

Maria Banks

Oh, okay, all right. Well, we we launched on January 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Kennedy Space Center, and we had about 45 days for our transit to the moon, and so that included our time in Earth orbit. Then we did our TLI burn, that’s the trans lunar injection burn, to head off to the moon. And then a very exciting moment when we approached the moon, we had to do our LOI burn, the lunar orbit insertion burn, to slow ourselves down just enough to be captured by the moon’s gravity and go into orbit around the moon, and then spent a little time in orbit before we headed to the surface on March 2. So from January 15 to March 2. And so during that time, you know, following along with all of this, I was going back and forth a little bit between Austin and New York, juggling my operations and relying on this amazing team of project scientists that we have, that we would take shifts to to make sure one of us was there whenever one of the instruments, one of our NASA instruments, was operating. And of course, we have a fabulous team of what we call mission managers out of Marshall Space Flight Center, and then also our integration managers. We were all on deck at different times, there to support the instrument teams and the different ways, from a science perspective, operational engineering and so on. And so we were, we were basically on console, which means on your headset, talking with the instrument teams and working with Firefly their payload coordinators in the operations center, helping to to get through those operations whenever one of the NASA instruments was up to do a health check, or some of our instruments were actually operating and collecting science in transit to the moon at different times during that those 45 days. So we were, we were all on on deck at different times to to support those activities. so during that time, that was really, really fun. We all got to learn how to work together really efficiently, which was great so that we were ready to roll once we got to the surface, and I’m really grateful to sue here that that’s on our podcast here, who also helped me during that time, going, taking different shifts, working with the operations, and we all work together to make that happen in 45 days. It’s a really long time. So that was a really great experience, and all leading up to this exciting moment of descending to the surface. And I did mention, probably, you know, the two most exciting times were that I mentioned the TLI burn and the LOI burn. And I made sure I was in the Operations Center at that time to watch those burns. And you know, they’re really important for those to go correctly so that you head off on the right trajectory, or that you slow down enough to get into lunar orbit. And so those were particularly exciting moments to be there in the operation center. Of course, this is the first time Firefly was doing this. And so their team worked amazingly, and they would put certain graphics up on the screens to watch. You know, they would have like a yellow line, say, where you know it would show it would plot our progress, and maybe our, it could be our velocity, say, and you know, they’d say, you want to be below the yellow line, but above the green line. And so we would all watch little graphs like this, cheering it along, holding our breath a little bit, and I will say one of, one of my favorite images that I saw. We brought it down into the operations center, and it was a, it was a picture taken from one of the lander cameras on the top deck, and it just shows the view across the top deck of the lander. And then just very, very close nearby is you couldn’t, you couldn’t, you couldn’t even fit it into the entire field of view. Just about a quarter of the moon that we were heading right to is right before we did that LOI burn, to slow ourselves down and get into lunar orbit and to just see that view that the lander has. We’re getting so close to that moon. And it was just that was a breathtaking moment to see that’s where we were, right in that moment of time right before our burn, it was fantastic.

Gary Jordan 

Oh yes, yeah, you know where your destination is, and there it is, a lot bigger in your field of view. And this is an interesting part about CLPS, is how we’re working together with commercial partners, right? You mentioned Firefly aerospace. They were the ones flying the lander, and then your role was really, and correct me if I’m wrong, is, are my payloads okay, right? Let’s follow the mission. Oh my gosh, my payloads are getting closer to the moon. That’s sort of the relationship here. You’re not actually flying, you’re not actually conducting the burns, but you’re there to make sure your instruments, your scientific instruments, get to the moon safely.

Maria Banks

Yes, absolutely. It was definitely, you know multiple people working together. You have the team itself that’s on console talking with the Firefly payload coordinator, who’s really helping to talk with the others in the operation center on the Firefly side to make sure we’re ready for the operation to communicate anything, any situational awareness that they might want to know. And then also to help with, you know, saying we’re ready to go with commands to actually have the operations proceed. And then I was there to help coordinate that as needed, to communicate with other teams, letting them know they’re up next. Or, you know, helping the operations proceed. And then also there, you know, if decisions needed to be made, you know, perhaps we can’t do all of an operation that we wanted to, you know, we can have a quick conversation and evaluate, you know, the situation as a whole, as to how best to proceed. And so it was definitely a great team experience. Everyone working together to make all those pieces flow together and make sure that my job is also to make sure we maximize our science return, make sure everyone gets at least their minimum science and as much as possible maximize that science, enhance that science return. And so really fun to work with both Firefly and the teams on thinking ways that we could do that together and make it all fit. And it was, yeah, it was a really fun experience, almost like putting together a puzzle with different pieces and trying to put it together in different ways to make the puzzle bigger and bigger.

Gary Jordan

Yeah, it sounds like it was very much all hands on deck. Sue, I know you. It sounds like you were, you were part of the mix too, even though, you know you talked about supporting all the missions. So even for blue ghost mission one, you know you were there was it’s a long flight, 45 days is a long time. So you’re, you’re jumping in, you’re helping out. You’re part of this team that’s communicating and checking out everything. And Firefly aerospace for Blue Ghost Mission 1, it had a lot of NASA payloads, right? I think was 10. Yeah, 10 NASA payloads. So there’s a lot to look after.

Sue Lederer

Absolutely. And the point that you make is the word team, right? Teamwork is so important. And one of the the questions that people ask is, you know, what’s it like to work for NASA? What’s it like to work for CLPS? And working for CLPS has a teamwork environment that is so incredibly supportive. The people are all incredibly gifted. They’re very motivated. They want to support each other. And during the missions is when tensions are high, where sometimes things don’t go exactly how you expect them to go. And instead of making it difficult because we’re such a team family, it worked really, really well, where everybody was supporting each other. Hey, what do you need here? What do you need there? Maria did the same for me during the IM-1 mission where things didn’t go nominally at all. And of course, there’s this really kind of annoying thing that. Happens during a mission, you have to go home and sleep. Sometimes, yeah, you really want to be there 24 hours a day, right Maria? But instead, yeah, you have to go home and sleep,

Maria Banks  

If I could have figured out how not to sleep, that would have been great.

Sue Lederer

Yes, but you really need to rely on your team support for that. So we had great payload integration managers, the other PJ team PJ being project scientists that are sitting on console next to the payload operators, making sure that we’re getting what we need for our payload teams and working with the individual payloads themselves. It was really incredible to see how incredibly professional they were. And not just sitting on console, but also, one of the big goals for NASA is to make sure that we share the excitement, we share the results. We talk about these things in places like podcasts with yourself. And Natalia has been an incredible resource for us on the PAO side, so that when we had press releases, I mean, all of these people pieces are so important for NASA to understand what we’re doing and to then share that information with all of the rest of the world, right? NASA isn’t just here for the people that are working for NASA. Our whole purpose is to support the US, to support science and exploration as a whole, for our country and for the world. And CLPS is really doing this in a different way that NASA hasn’t done before, and it’s been incredible.

Gary Jordan

It’s a huge reason why we joined these companies as part of the broadcasts for, for these landings, right? So for, for Blue Ghost Mission 1, for example, we went over to Austin and collaborated to sit together and bring all of these subject matter experts from Firefly Aerospace, from NASA, and talk about the whole experience. And it there was. It just looked like so much energy. I wish so badly I could be there. I was fortunate enough to be part of the beginning visits to go check out the space and start to lay the foundation for what joint coverage can look like. But I unfortunately couldn’t be there for the day of and boy, was I jealous.

Sue Lederer  

Don’t worry, we have missions coming up.

Gary Jordan 

I will be there this time. I’m not missing out because they just look like so much fun, Maria, if you if you don’t mind me jumping back to you to help us relive the moment of touching down on the lunar surface in Austin, Texas.

Maria Banks

Oh, well. I mean, I’ve been dreaming about this since I decided I wanted to be a planetary scientist, just, you know, fan of fighting about what it would be like to be in a Mission Operations Center when we actually landed something. And so what a thrill to live out that dream and be able to do that. And it, you know, it’s, it just happens really fast when you’re in the moment, when you’re in the operation center, there’s so many things to watch and pay attention to. And it was, it was, it was almost surreal, like it was, it was almost a thought of, did that really just happen? It seemed there was a pause, and then everybody just kind of jumped up and gave a great big cheer. And my first instinct was to turn around and slap a high five with my partner in crime, the Firefly Aerospace payload coordinator. Her name is Farah, and that’s the picture that actually made it into the New York Times, and everyone’s jumping up, and Farah and I are about to slap a high five, which kind of funny, but that sort of gave the moment. I just wanted to turn to my colleague and just celebrate with her really quickly. And I will say, though you know this amazing moment of emotion, I know that folks that were in the building, but not in the operations center. They were in sort of a back operations room, and they said they could hear our cheer like down the hall, up on the second floor. It was really spectacular. But I also want to share with you that from a, you know, from a payload perspective, also from from my very personal my job, you know, there wasn’t much for me to do with landing, you know, we it was, there was nothing I could do or control in that moment. So I was just along for the ride. But we had one payload in particular that was operating during that descent. It’s a camera system called SCLPSS, and that was their that’s their big moment. That was their data. They were to collect that, that data as we descended to the surface. They wanted to, they want to study how the regolith and the engines interact with each other. You know, our influence on that regolith on the surface, and I can talk about that a little bit more, but that was their big moment. They needed to be turned on and to power, powered on, and to capture those images during that time period, and it they automatically turn on when they sense what, what elevation or altitude we’re at. And so, so again, we just watch, and we wait and we hope. And I was, I was looking at the screen, and I could see that they were powered on. And then I saw I. Just after I’d sat down, after the celebration I was I had them pulled up the biggest thing on my screen, and I could see one file click on, and then two, and then it started going faster, 3, 4, 5, as they started to the count of the files from the images that they had acquired, started to tick up and up and up. And I think that’s when the tears started to stream down my face.

Gary Jordan

All the all the work that went into building up and preparing for a moment like that. And you get to live it. And what’s exciting here is, I, you know, I want to talk about some of the, some of the fascinating science that’s done on the surface. But with the one you mentioned, SCLPSS, is one that’s done as you’re descending to the surface, which I think is, is fantastic representation of the science starts even before, even before you land, and that’s and there’s a lot more that we can go through. Sue, we were laughing ahead of this, because you almost got to be there and cheering with everybody, but you had to be somewhere else.

Sue Lederer

Indeed. So I had a mission that was a lot faster. We launched on February 26 with IM-2, and we landed on March 6. So because Firefly launched before and its mission lasted later, I started off by helping to support with the transit operations before IM-2, and then came back to Houston and ran the whole IM-2 mission for the project science side, with a lot of help from the payload integration managers in the CLPS office. And then turned around, got in the car as quickly as I could and drove back to Firefly after our mission was over to help finish in the meanwhile, because landing happens sort of in the middle of the night, but I had to be a good girl and couldn’t be in Austin for the landing. Instead, I was on the loops listening in while laying in bed with my laptop on the desk around on the table next to me, so that I could really take part in watching it and seeing all the celebration and, gosh, there’s just so much work that goes into it, and so many emotions for all these people that have put their heart and soul into the science that they’re so dedicated to learn. And all of the people from Intuitive Machines and from Firefly Astrobotic as well, where this is their whole life, and it comes down to this moment of landing so I could lay there and cheer them on and hear my besties voice, Maria being my PJ bestie. We do a lot of operations together, and it’s been great. Our other PJs are also amazing. And so hearing their voices on the loop and watching them cheer, and seeing Chris Colbert, who was just finishing his tenure as the manager of CLPS up on stage, and how excited he was. And it was just it was so much fun for me to see all of my colleagues really reveling in this amazing achievement.

Gary Jordan

Trying to get the sleep that you need, to support the operations as you’re describing it. It sounds like your heart was going and you were just so excited, very emotional moment that you just, you just don’t want to miss.

Sue Lederer 

Correct, and so hard to fall back asleep.

Maria Banks

Sue, I’ll tell you you were right there with us in spirit. We knew you were right there and back at you. I wanted so to be there with you, for your landing for I am too. And we were there in spirit. We I turned my computer screen or my monitor to watch the landing there, and we were all in the operations center. Had it up on all of our screens right there. We were right with you as you were descending to the surface.

Sue Lederer

Yeah. It’s actually been really interesting and neat to also see the interaction between Intuitive Machines and Firefly sending little notes and care packages to each other, right? So it’s not just, I mean, there’s always-

Maria Banks 

Boxes of coffee!

Sue Lederer 

Yes! There may be some, you know, competition, but there’s so much support, and they work together as well. And so this is another thing that I find to be incredible within the CLPS world, is each of these vendors reaching out to each other and supporting each other in this way.

Gary Jordan

Yeah, I love that, because there’s definitely friendly competition, right, for sure, but at the end of the day, we’re all building an economy together, right? And so to see that, it’s an interesting dynamic and and I remember just working with some of the colleagues at Firefly and at intuitive machines, and it’s, it’s a wonderful group and a wonderful culture like you’re describing, I want to make sure we hit some of the science and so, well, actually, before we do that, let me talk real quickly about Intuitive Machines, right? Because you said, what’s interesting is, as we’re going through the dates, right? It may we may not have said it outright, but there was a certain point where there were two spacecraft flying to the moon at the same time, right? So it’s just, there’s a lot going on around that late February, early March timeframe. So take us to IM-2 landing, Sue.

Sue Lederer

Absolutely. So we having worked both the first and second missions for Intuitive Machines, it was really interesting. And in fact, also. Working with Astrobotic and Firefly, watching all of them and how their teams interacted. Remember that these are companies where it is the very first time they’ve ever built a lander, and it’s the very first time they’ve ever flown the lander. So imagine, along with me, that you’re getting your pilot’s license. So this is a little bit my background. I got a pilot’s license some years ago. So I imagine myself from those first early days where you have to learn how to take off and land right. And you do this over and over and over again before you actually venture out and go a little farther and go a little farther. You don’t start by the very first time that you try to fly a brand new spacecraft that’s never been flown by anybody to you know, imagine trying to fly an airplane first time you take off and not just go around, not just in the local area, but do an inner, a flight across the ocean to from America over to Europe and land when you had never flown an airplane before in your life.

So this is the kind of thing that they did first time they built the spacecraft, first time they each flew. And what it means is like, no matter how many times you do simulations, it is not the same as feeling the spacecraft respond, and how it handles being in deep space and in a vacuum, and the really extreme heat and cold of the sun coming in, and then you do, I mean, there’s miles of harnesses and wires and the software just 1000s and 1000s of lines of code. So the first time you fly, everything. You’re going to run into some issues, right? There’s going to be things that you have to learn and fix along the way. And this is the thing that each of those companies did so well, is they had such a good team that worked together that when things came up, they figured out as a team how to fix them, how to overcome the challenges. And so for watching Intuitive Machines 1 and 2, the first mission was just, it was challenge after challenge, something would happen, oh but we figured it out, another challenge. Oh but we figured it out, another challenge. Oh but we figured it out. And it was like you were saying, like the adrenaline is running and you don’t want to leave. And you know what happened lately, just between the first and the second mission, the second mission was like a totally different mission. It was they launched. The burns were picture perfect, like really tiny margins. They were so within their error, it was like, suddenly you’re, you know, Danica Patrick, flying through space with with a well oiled machine. And it was incredible to watch. I was like this. This is really weird, because I can get sleep, and we got to the surface, and everything felt like it was going just a little too well.

And then, as you know, that there was a problem with the altimeter, where we couldn’t figure out, the lander couldn’t figure out exactly how high it was above the surface. It misjudged the height above the surface. So what had some horizontal velocity? Tripped and fell over onto its side, so in that moment, right? I mean, usually, usually, I don’t know if there’s any usually in space, but you watch all the missions that have gone from all the countries, and it’s either you land up right or you crash spectacularly. And you have seen so many of these with so many incredible people. The one thing we didn’t expect is not one, but two, where it landed in such a way that it fell over, but then the spacecraft was still able to operate the payloads. That is not something that we ever expect in our world, right? So it was a different kind of okay. Now, what do we do? We’re off nominal. We’re not getting solar power the way that we want. So now, instead of operating the way we want to, we’re operating in contingency operations. And so that’s where our role, Maria’s role, my role, is really interacting with the vendors, then to figure out, what are we going to do now to maximize the output, to ensure that we get some successes and that we are able to do some testing of technologies that we wouldn’t be able to do if we weren’t even in this configuration.

Gary Jordan

You talked about this a little bit before we started the podcast, but it was like, like, switching into gear or something. Like, you land, you like, it’s all this excitement, and you’re following the fight, following the flight. But really, as we, as we mentioned in the beginning is it’s about getting the payloads, the science, to the surface to start doing. So you talked about, like contingency, right? Yes, okay, we landed. It’s not it’s not crash. It’s not like we lost everything. So what can we do? Yes. So I think one of the things, and just to stay on IM-2 for a bit, is, is the drill, right? There was, there was one that was. One of the experiments there, one of the one of the payloads that was on Nova-C, correct?

Sue Lederer

So PRIME-1 was a combination of the TRIDENT drill and MSOLO, which is a mass spectrometer, which is a fancy way of saying it’s sniffing things that easily evaporate or in space. We call it sublimate, going from a solid directly to a gas. So they’re trying to figure out things like water ice or methane ice or oxygen, whatever happens to be their hydrogen that it can detect. So that’s MSOLO’s job, TRIDENT’s job was to drill into the surface of the moon and then pull up Moon dirt, which we call regolith in the science world, so that if there are ices that are intermixed with that soil, that when it comes up to the surface and exposed to the vacuum of space, those ices then off gas, and they’re detected by MSOLO. So those were the two goals for the PRIME-1 payload suite. So now we’re on the surface, and we’re lying on the side, and instead of being upright, so the drill could drill into the surface, it’s instead horizontal. So now we have a drill in a horizontal configuration. We know it can run in a horizontal configuration because we’ve tested it this way, but we’ve never tested it in the vacuum of space, in the heat and cold of space, after going through the transit and the landing, and so we still have this opportunity to test the technologies out. So we did that for IM-2. We were able to test the drill and have it extend fully. We were able to rotate the drill right, the auger of the drill. We were able to- they have a percussive element where they’re kind of like pounding onto the surface, but it’s just using that mechanism to show that that works, and the heater for the drill can turn on. So it’s testing all the technologies that the drill needs to be able to use for drilling into the surface. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to reach the surface. In the meanwhile, we have MSOLO, which is designed to detect things that evaporate easily. And imagine this, we have propellants in Athena, the lander, that are liquid oxygen and liquid methane. So we said, hey, we have this idea. We want to see if we- if you bleed off a little bit of your propellant, we want to see if we can detect that. So they worked really well with us and and asked us, you know, what do you want? How long do you want? Rates, which order do you want? So we came up with this new plan, very, very, very quickly. I had people from NASA Headquarters sitting with the PRIME-1 team in Florida, I had people from headquarters that were sitting in the back room, like the we have a tiger team, basically with I am and they were working on, what can we get as fast as possible with as little data coming back and as low power as possible to be able to do these tests before we run out of power with the payload team, so we had that all set up, and we had MSOLO run, and it was able to detect things. So we now have increased our technology readiness level because we’ve operated in space, which we hadn’t done before. So even though we didn’t test it in the way that we had hoped, we were still able to advance the technologies, which is really important for what we’re doing in CLPS.

Gary Jordan

Right? Yeah, and this is all a learning experience, right? Three and we, like you said, we landed three times, so that’s so that’s something, right? We’re and we’re getting there. And this is the benefit of clips Jumping over to Maria real quick just to highlight maybe a couple of payloads that you find that, or especially if they have stories for operating payloads on Blue Ghost.

Maria Banks 

Yes, absolutely, yeah, I can. I can kind of give you an overview of some of our instruments. In particular, we had several instruments that focused on dust mitigation and collection, so we talked a bit about SCLPSS already. They captured more than 9000 images, including during that that descent to the surface that we discussed. And as I mentioned, they’re looking at the effects of the engine plumes on the surface. And they also collected images on the surface during the lunar day, intermittently, you know, on an hourly basis, to look at the changing illumination environment and look at the changes to the regolith in the surface.

We also had a Lunar PlanetVac. So this is it. It’s Lunar PlanetVac. We call it LPV, and they successfully demonstrated a low cost, low mass solution for future robotic sample collection. So they were able to collect, transfer and sort lunar regolith particles using just pressurized gas and nitrogen gas, and just even in their first operation, within their first five seconds, they successfully captured 13 grams of regolith, including several grams of two millimeter scale rocklets. So this is this instruments already been included in several other clips proposals, and we’ll be flying on a mission to Phobos.

Let’s see what else we had the EDS, which is the electrodynamic dust shield. And so EDS successfully lifted and removed the lunar regolith from surfaces, from a glass and thermal radio radiator surface that is inside the instrument using only electrodynamic forces. So this is really cool. It worked really well, and it demonstrated a promising solution for dust mitigation on future lunar interplanetary surface operation, demonstrating that you can remove dust and regolith from surfaces just using those electrodynamic forces.

We also had RAC which is the Regolith Adherence Characterization instrument, and this just had 15 slots with 15 different materials, both from NASA research centers and some commercial companies, and they examined how lunar regolith interacted with a range of this range of materials when exposed to the moon’s environment. And the purpose of this instrument is to test and improve and protect spacecraft, spacesuits, habitats, understand better how different materials interact with abrasive lunar dust, so we can understand how to build those spacecraft, spacesuits and habitats to better mitigate those effects.

We also had a couple of instruments that dealt with navigation and distance measurements, such as LuGRE, which is the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment. So this instrument was meant to acquire and track GNSS or Global Navigation Satellite System signals, particularly from the GPS and Galileo constellations. And so it would detect them, acquire the signal, and then calculate instantaneous navigation fixes this, both en route to and on the lunar surface. So this, this is just so exciting, because this achievement demonstrated that we can use these signals to support navigation, not only in cislunar space, but also on the surface of the moon. And this was also a partnership between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, and they they broke their first world record on January 19. That was a record of the farthest distance from Earth to acquire the GNSS signal and calculate that navigation fix. And then they just proceeded to keep breaking their own records throughout the mission.

Also we had the Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector, the NGLR. And this is, this is a retroreflector that builds upon the retroreflectors that flew during Apollo. they’re supposed to reflect laser light sent from the earth from Lunar Laser Ranging Observatories, or LLROs, on the earth. And they had already, it had already successfully reflected and returned laser light from Earth before the even the end of the mission. And now it has even been able to do a return from LOLA, which is the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which is flying on LRO, which is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, a NASA spacecraft in orbit around the moon. And they have even ranged to the retro reflector and NGLR also.

And I know we’re running out of time, but we also had a couple of instruments that dealt with the lunar environment and internal structure, and if I can just mention those real quickly we had we also had a drill called LISTER, the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration and Rapidity. And so this this drill was meant to drill into the surface and acquire thermal measurements incrementally. And so it was able to successfully do that at eight depths down to about one meter, making it this time, actually the deepest robotic planetary subsurface thermal probe to date, so a first time demonstration of um, robotic thermal measurements at varying depths.

And they were their data is very complementary to another instrument called the LMS, or the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, um, really, another very cool instrument. It’s deployed sensors in different directions, and those sensors can study the moon’s interior by measuring electric and magnetic fields and characterizing the interior the moon down to great depths, over 1000 kilometers, which is nearly half the distance to the moon center.

And one, actually two more instruments to talk about. We have LEXI, the Lunar Environment, heliospheric X-ray Imager, which captured X-ray images to study the interaction of the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field. And these results are providing insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces surrounding the earth affect the planet. And this instrument, we were able to operate during sunset and into the lunar night. And actually, some of our cleanest data was collected after sunset. And the team is busy preparing some materials actually focused on emissions, probing the moon’s exosphere.

And the last instrument, there were 10 instruments! There are a lot of instruments to keep track of. The last one is the RadPC, which is the Radiation-Tolerant Computing System. So this is a space computing technology, and it mitigates the impact of what’s called single event effects through series of novel fault recovery procedures. So basically, RadPC is a it’s verifying solutions to mitigate the radiation effects on computers. And this, of course, is going to make future missions safer for equipment and more cost effective. And this instrument operated actually for the longest duration of all of our instruments, through the earth Van Allen belt. That’s where they actually experienced the most severe radiation during the entire mission, during the whole transit too, and in lunar orbit and then on the surface. And we were actually able to operate red PC during the solar eclipse, and then during sunset and into the lunar night.

Gary Jordan

Man, we just blasted through all the scientific instruments. That is fantastic. There was so much, so much that- you know, well done! Seriously. Because I think really what this demonstrates is just how much you can do in many different disciplines, navigation, the lunar environment, understanding, dust testing, technologies, I mean, just in a couple of flights over a couple of years. And so, you know, I can, I’m- what I really appreciated was just how passionate you both are about everything, right? Just just, not only just kind of dealing with your payload, but supporting one another and the team, and supporting the the different commercial providers and and being a part of this big community and How excited everyone is for all the science that we’re doing in this and this economy that’s a part of of commercial lunar payloads. Just just getting that from both of you, I think, was energizing enough, but the science itself is also very, very fascinating. But I’m glad we got through all the science. But we do have to, I do have to wrap up, unfortunately. Sue and Maria, thank you both first, for spending so much time and and bringing me to these very exciting moments. Hope that we, you know, we can get more people to be a part of these. Because you said, more missions are coming up, right? We’re not done. And so that is very exciting to know that more coming up, and we get to really relive moments like these very soon. So thank you both for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast

Sue Lederer

Thanks for having us.

Maria Banks

Thanks so much for having us.

Gary Jordan

Hey, thanks for sticking around. Hope you learned something new today.

You can check out the latest from across the agency nasa.gov and you can find our full collection of episodes, and all the other wonderful NASA podcasts we have at nasa.gov/podcasts.

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This interview was recorded on July 17, 2025.

Our producer is Dane Turner. Audio engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill. Houston We Have a Podcast was created and is supervised by me, Gary Jordan. Thanks to Natalia Riusech for helping to bring this episode to life. And of course, thanks again to Sue Lederer and Maria Banks for taking the time to come on the show.

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