Texas Tech University has been awarded a $5.4 million grant from NASA to fund the development and testing of the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) for its third mission to the Moon. The funding will be distributed over four years.
LISTER, developed by Texas Tech geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics, is designed to measure heat flow beneath the lunar surface. The instrument drills into the Moon and records temperature changes and thermal conductivity at various depths. During its first mission as part of Blue Ghost Mission 1, LISTER collected eight measurements and reached a depth of about three feet below the surface.
“We expect that the heat released from the surface of the Moon varies from one place to another; in other words, some parts of the Moon are hotter than others,” said Nagihara. “To get the big picture for the whole Moon, we need to measure heat flow at a number of different places on the Moon. LISTER 1 went to Mare Crisium. LISTER 2 is headed for the Schrödinger crater in late 2027. We do not know where on the Moon LISTER 3 is going yet. I plan to have a discussion with NASA on the matter in the near future.”
The upcoming mission will be carried out through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative under its Artemis campaign. An American spaceflight company, which has not yet been selected, will deliver LISTER 3 to its lunar destination no earlier than 2028.
“With CLPS, NASA has been taking a new approach to lunar science, relying on U.S. industry innovation to travel to the surface of the Moon and enable scientific discovery,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These selections continue this pipeline of lunar exploration, through research that will not only expand our knowledge about the Moon’s history and environment but also inform future human safety and navigation on the Moon and beyond.”
Nagihara highlighted that confidence in LISTER’s performance has grown following its successful operation during Blue Ghost Mission 1: “The one thing different about LISTER 3 is that it was selected after LISTER 1 successfully operated on the Moon on the Blue Ghost mission,” he said. “LISTER 2 was funded well before the Blue Ghost mission. Back then, there was no guarantee that LISTER would work as intended, because it had not flown before. But now, having seen how LISTER 1 did on the Moon, there is increased confidence that LISTER will successfully operate again.
“When the NASA people called me to inform me of their selection of LISTER 3, they told me they were pleased with how LISTER 1 worked. So the selection of LISTER 3 makes my team very proud. Our LISTER research and development effort for the last 15 years is paying off.”
Further details about LISTER’s development can be found in Texas Tech’s Evermore magazine.
