The last time NASA collected data on the heat emerging from the moon‘s interior was when the space agency still sent astronauts on Apollo missions.
The lunar heat-flow study had seemingly ended. Because the data can’t be obtained with orbiters, no further measurements were taken after just two were made in the 1970s. But all that has changed since Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace successfully landed Blue Ghost on the moon on March 2.
The uncrewed spacecraft, carrying 10 NASA experiments, has just achieved the first collection of heat-flow data without humans, solely using robotic technology. Called the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity, or LISTER, the instrument has been drilling into the lunar soil. Mission controllers have watched it digging underground through a video transmission beamed back to Earth.
“By making similar measurements at multiple locations on the lunar surface, we can reconstruct the thermal evolution of the Moon,” said Seiichi Nagihara, a geophysics professor at Texas Tech University and LISTER’s principal investigator, in a statement.
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