NASA is Sending a Vacuum Cleaner to the Moon

By the end of this decade, NASA, the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA), Roscosmos, and other space agencies plan to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon. A crucial aspect of these plans is using local resources (particularly water) to lessen dependence on Earth, a process known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Hence why NASA plans to establish a base of operations around the lunar south pole, a heavily cratered region where water ice exists in abundance in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs).

To harvest water ice and other resources successfully, NASA is investing in technologies that will enable cost-effective sample collection, in-situ testing (with or without astronaut oversight), and real-time data transmission to Earth. One such technology is the Lunar PlanetVac (LPV), a sample acquisition and delivery system designed to collect and transfer lunar regolith to sample containers without reliance on gravity. The LPV is one of 10 payloads that will be flown to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, LPV is a pneumatic, compressed gas-powered vacuum cleaner designed to work in low gravity and the near vacuum of space. Once the lander reaches the lunar surface, the LPV sampling head will use its supply of compressed gas to stir up the lunar regolith, which will then be funneled into a transfer tube via the payload’s secondary pneumatic jets and collected in a sample container. The regolith will then be sieved and photographed inside the container, and the findings will be transmitted back to Earth in real-time.

The operation will be entirely autonomous and is expected to take just a few seconds. NASA also claims the operation will be conducted in accordance with planetary protection protocols. According to Dennis Harris, who manages the LPV payload for the CLPS initiative at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the LPV has the potential to be a game changer. As he stated in a recent NASA press release:

“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.”

The LPV will be flown to the Moon aboard the Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander (developed by Firefly Aerospace) no sooner than January 15th. The other payloads include technology demonstrations that will investigate regolith adherence, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) abilities, radiation tolerant computing, and dust mitigation using electrodynamic fields. The lander will also investigate heat flow from the lunar interior, plume-surface interactions, crustal electric and magnetic fields, and take X-ray images of the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Further Reading: NASA