NASA tests lunar landing plume hazards in a 60-foot vacuum sphere

Inside a 60-foot spherical vacuum chamber at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, a simulated rocket plume is striking a bed of artificial lunar soil. The burst lasts about six seconds. In that brief window, Ashley Korzun’s team watches dust, rocks, and regolith — the loose material covering the Moon — fly away from the impact zone, toward the lander’s surroundings and anything else nearby.

The first test system was designed by NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, then built and operated by Purdue University. It produces a maximum of about 100 pounds of thrust, heats up but does not burn, and fires into Black Point-1, a roughly six-and-a-half-foot diameter, one-foot-deep bin of simulated lunar regolith. Cameras and other instruments measure the crater, the angle and height of the ejecta sheet, the distribution of solid material, and the speed of the particles.

That detail matters because a landing engine does not simply push a spacecraft downward. Its exhaust can move surface material into the path of the lander or toward payloads, experiments, rovers, and other assets. The tests give NASA physical observations to improve models that predict those effects and inform the design of lunar hardware.

A second round planned for later this year will use a 14-inch 3D-printed hybrid rocket motor developed at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It produces around 35 pounds of thrust by igniting solid propellant and gaseous oxygen. Researchers will run both propulsion systems at different heights, creating a range of conditions for spacecraft of different kinds.

So what changes in practice? Better measurements could help NASA and commercial partners place equipment more safely around landing zones and refine the systems intended to protect crews during Artemis missions. The campaign is still a ground-based laboratory test, not a lunar demonstration. Its modular design could later be adapted for Mars by changing the soil simulant, hardware, instruments, and chamber pressure; for now, NASA is using it to prepare for lunar landings beginning with Artemis IV in 2028.