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Mission Space has been selected by NASA under the Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity (ACO) to advance LEEMR, a compact lunar dust and surface-charging monitoring instrument developed for future lunar surface operations, in collaboration with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The project supports Mission Space's expansion from orbital space-weather intelligence into lunar surface environmental monitoring.
Work under this ACO aligns with NASA's priorities to accelerate lunar surface capabilities, including sustained Moon operations, commercial lunar infrastructure, and more frequent surface missions.
LEEMR (the Lunar Electrostatic Environment MonitoR) is built for the conditions lunar assets will face on the surface. Dust behavior changes with local electric fields, solar wind interaction, landing activity, rover movement, astronaut activity, and nearby charged structures. The instrument measures surface charge accumulation, dust density variation, and dust charging levels in real time around landers, rovers, habitats, tools, power systems, and surface stations.
Mission Space is developing LEEMR as part of a broader lunar environmental monitoring architecture: compact instruments deployed near operational assets to provide local data for infrastructure protection, hazard modeling, and mission planning.
The project builds on Mission Space's existing space-weather hardware and software heritage. LEEMR reuses validated electronics and autonomous measurement components from Mission Space's ZOHAR radiation monitoring payloads, reducing development risk and supporting maturation toward a flight-ready instrument design.
"Upcoming lunar missions are putting landers, rovers, payloads, power systems, and crews on the lunar surface," said Mary Glaz, CEO and co-founder of Mission Space. "They need data to design missions and real-time warnings tied to actual mission conditions: asset location, surface activity, dust behavior, charging, and radiation changes around the hardware. LEEMR is the first step toward Mission Space's real-time space environment platform for lunar surface operations."
Mission Space currently operates proprietary space-weather instrumentation in orbit and is developing localized warning and monitoring products for satellite operators, government agencies, defense users, and future lunar infrastructure. The NASA ACO selection extends that roadmap from orbital space-weather intelligence into lunar surface environmental monitoring.
