NASA Lander to Test Vacuum Cleaner on Moon for Sample Collection

A technology demonstration flying aboard the next delivery for NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative could change how research teams collect and study soil and rock samples on other planetary bodies. Lunar PlanetVac, or LPV, is one of 10 payloads set to be carried to the Moon by the Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander in 2025. Developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company of Altadena, California, LPV is designed to, essentially, operate as a vacuum cleaner with a pneumatic, compressed gas-powered sample acquisition and delivery system to efficiently collect and transfer lunar soil from the surface to other science instruments or sample return containers. Investigations and demonstrations, such as LPV, launched on CLPS flights will help NASA study Earth’s nearest neighbor under Artemis and pave the way for future crewed missions on the Moon. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the development for seven of the 10 CLPS payloads that will be carried on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander.

What is said in the film

one day we're going to live and work on, on the moon. And we need to know, is there is there any water or are there any, any volatiles, any kind of chemicals that we can use for manufacturing? Say we want to build a landing pad. How can we use the lunar soil to do that I'm Dennis Harris. I'm the lunar payload manager for lunar Planet VAC.

I'm based in Huntsville, Alabama, at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Little Planet VAC is one of ten NASA instruments flying on the next CLPS mission. It is designed to gather soil samples and either canister them up for a trip back to the Earth, or to distribute them to any onboard instruments that might want to do in situ. And that is in place. Measurements to, look at the chemical composition of the soil.

Space is limited on the rocket and so is the mass. And so anything we can find on the surface that we can use to manufacture or build, housing or launch pads is a benefit to the space program in the long term. The lunar planet vac instrument will help us understand the environment on the moon and environments on other planets that we're going to travel to. The same company who's building lunar planet vac is also have, a very similar instrument flying to Phobos on a different mission. So we're going to look at these different environments that we have to live in long term and understand them better Lunar Planet VAC is a collaboration with Honeybee Robotics, company based out of Palo Alto, California.

NASA's Marshall's role is to facilitate the funding, the design, the build, the test and delivery of the lpv to the, spacecraft for delivery to the lunar surface. Commercial lunar payload services. NASA and American companies working together.

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