University of Colorado Boulder scientists are participating in five lander missions to the moon in the next few years to conduct science experiments and test technology, helping NASA prepare to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

These lunar lander missions are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which lands spacecraft built by private companies on the moon’s surface.

“We’re very fortunate that the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program that NASA has initiated in recent years is finally starting to come to fruition, so we have this whole lineup of missions coming up,” CU Boulder professor and planetary scientist Paul Hayne said.

This wave of missions is setting the stage for the Artemis program, a NASA mission aiming to land people on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The Artemis missions seek to land on the moon for scientific discovery and technology advancement. NASA also wants to learn how to live and work on the moon as a step in preparing for missions to Mars.

“To do that, we first need to learn more about the moon and its environment,” Hayne said.

The first mission with CU Boulder connections landed on the moon on Thursday, but the lander toppled over and died a day later. The toppled Athena spacecraft built by the company Intuitive Machines in Houston was carrying a camera called Moon3D. The camera was supposed to create the first 3D images of its kind of the lunar surface, and Hayne was part of a team that was going to collect the data from the camera.

“At this point, we don’t have any useful scientific data from the rover, and we don’t expect that to change,” Hayne said.

He said teams at Intuitive Machines will debrief to understand what went wrong and what needs to be corrected for the next time. Athena was the company’s second lander to fall over. The company’s first lunar lander, Odysseus, toppled sideways during landing last year and cut a different CU Boulder experiment short.“It’s disappointing. This was the second attempt by Intuitive Machines to land, so we had a lot of confidence in their ability to deliver the payloads to the moon. They were almost there and nearly succeeded,” Hayne said, adding, “We are looking forward to their next attempts.”

Hayne said he still has confidence in the company, which he believes has highly capable leadership, to solve any issues for future missions. Intuitive Machines is planning another lander, which does not yet have a name, that Hayne will be involved in, and is set to launch in 2027. The lander will carry a camera called the Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System, which is an infrared heat-sensing camera.

The camera will capture heat-sensing images to study the moon’s surface temperatures and look for ice.

“This is something that hasn’t been done before up close, and we hope to identify places where astronauts might go and search for water when they’re out on missions,” Hayne said.

Although Intuitive Machines’ first lander, Odysseus, toppled over, CU Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns was still able to collect some data from his instrument before the lander ran out of power. Burns collected data from the Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photo Electron Sheath instrument, ROLSES, that was on the Odysseus lander.

Another instrument building on ROLSES, planned to launch to the moon in 2026, is called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Lite, LuSEE-Lite, instrument. LuSEE-Lite will be on a lander from the Massachusetts-based company Draper, the first lander the company has built.

The spacecraft will land on the moon’s Schrödinger Basin, which is a nearly 200-mile-wide impact crater on the part of the moon that never faces Earth. Once there, LuSEE-Lite will collect information on electric charges that hover above the moon’s surface and could pose risks to future astronauts.

A similar instrument called LuSEE-Night will build on data from LuSEE-Lite in another mission. LuSEE-Night will land on the far side of the moon and collect data on radio waves emanating from space far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy.

“I never thought it would take this long to get here, but at least I’m still able to participate in this research and see them fly,” Burns said. “I’m very excited to see this happen.”

Burns said the goal and hope is that the radio emissions collected will provide some insights into how first stars and galaxies formed. It will fly on the Blue Ghost 2 spacecraft from Firefly Aerospace in Texas, with a planned launch in 2026.

“We’re using the moon as a new kind of platform to observe the cosmos,” Burns said.

Blue Ghost 3, another Firefly Aerospace lander, will hold two CU Boulder instruments with a planned launch in 2028. This spacecraft will carry ROLSES 2 and will collect radio waves from the Earth, moon and sun. Radio waves from Earth can inform scientists about magnetic fields, and the hope is that scientists can use the data from ROLSES 2 to search for potentially habitable planets beyond Earth’s solar system.

The Blue Ghost 3 spacecraft will also carry a rover called the Lunar Vulkan Imaging Spectroscopy Explorer, or Lunar-VISE. This rover will explore the Gruithuisen Domes on the moon to try and unravel the mystery surrounding how the mountain-like volcanic domes formed.