NASA announced Monday that a Texas Tech professor’s lunar heat flow probe will be used for future moon landing missions.
In NASA’s first round of choosing instruments earlier this year, it contracted with nine companies – three of which are expected to fly within the next three years, said a Texas Tech news release. Instruments were built in NASA’s research centers and were the first group selected to go to the moon.
Now that NASA is selecting its second batch of instruments, Seiichi Nagihara, associate professor in the department of geosciences, will get to build his heat flow probe and watch it in action, said Texas Tech.
The instrument will be part of a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLIPS), and NASA is contracting with private companies to build and fly unmanned spacecraft to put Nagihara’s instrument named LISTER, stated the release.
While the LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity) is an acronym, Nagihara joked it was helpful in getting NASA to choose it since it pays homage to Clive Lister, a professor at the University of Washington who made important contribution to the study of heat flow through ocean floors on Earth from the 1970s to the 1990s, stated the release.
Nagihara explained that each CLPS landing mission is expected to have only eight to 10 Earth days of work time on the moon, so each of the payload instruments has to complete it work quickly.
“For the last couple of years, my team has been developing a lunar heat flor probe that can be deployed quickly in order to meet the CLPS landers’ requirements,” he added.
Nagihara will work with Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California to build and test LISTER and will ultimately deliver it to NASA, stated the release. Although the timeline has not been finalized, Nagihara said he expects it to be built within the next two to three years.
“It is a dream come true for a planetary scientist like me to conduct experiments on an extraterrestrial body with an instrument built to your own specifications,” said Nagihara.