EDITOR’S NOTE: This story, originally published in December, was revised Aug. 26, 2026 with an update on a new phase of testing, including video from a recent test run and new images.
To help NASA and commercial partners better understand the science of lunar landings, specifically the hazards that may occur when a lander’s engine plumes blast away at lunar dust, soil, and rocks, a team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, has initiated a series of plume-surface interaction tests inside a massive 60-foot spherical vacuum chamber.
As NASA works to return humans to the Moon starting with Artemis IV in 2028 and develop a Moon Base, the tests will provide a trove of data for researchers to use to improve predictive models and influence the design of space hardware.
“This plume-surface interaction ground test is the most complex test of its kind to be undertaken in a vacuum chamber,” said Ashley Korzun, testing lead at NASA Langley. “If I’m in a spacecraft and I’m going to move all that regolith while landing, some of that’s going to hit my lander. Some of it’s going to go out toward other things — payloads, science experiments, eventually rovers and other assets. Understanding those physics is pivotal to ensuring crew safety and mission success.”
The campaign involves multiple NASA centers, academic institutions, and commercial entities both small and large.
Korzun’ s team will test two types of propulsion systems in the vacuum sphere. For the first round of tests, they are using an ethane plume simulation system designed by NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and built and operated by Purdue University. The ethane system generates a maximum of about 100 pounds of thrust — imagine the force necessary to lift or support a 100-pound person. It heats up but doesn’t burn.
The team recently began firing the system into a roughly six-and-a-half-foot diameter, one-foot-deep bin of simulated lunar regolith, called Black Point-1, that has jagged, cohesive properties similar to actual lunar regolith.
A number of different instruments, including a version of the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies system that imaged the plume-surface interaction when Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission-1 landed on the Moon in 2025, are capturing data and imagery from the tests, which will only last about six seconds each. The instruments are measuring things such as crater formation, angle and height of the ejecta sheet, spatial distribution of solid ejecta, and the speed of the regolith particles as they get blasted out of the bin.
Later this year, a second round of tests will involve 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, igniting both solid propellant and a stream of gaseous oxygen to create a hot, powerful stream of rocket exhaust, simulating a real rocket engine but at smaller scale for this test series.
Researchers will test both propulsion systems at various heights.
“It gives us a huge range of test conditions,” Korzun said, “to be able to talk about spacecraft of all different kinds going to the Moon, and for us to understand what they’re going to do as they land or try to take back off from the surface.”
Korzun sees this test campaign as more than a one-shot, Moon-specific thing. The entire operation is modular by design and also can prepare NASA for missions to Mars. The lunar regolith simulant can be replaced with a Mars simulant that’s more like sand. Pieces of hardware and instrumentation can be unbolted and replaced to represent future Mars landers. Rather than take the vacuum sphere down to really low pressure like on the Moon, it can be adjusted to a pressure that simulates the atmosphere on the Red Planet.
“Mars has always been in our road maps,” Korzun said.
But for now, the Moon looms large.
“This test campaign is one of the most flight-relevant and highly instrumented plume-surface interaction test series NASA has ever conducted,” said Daniel Stubbs, an engineer with the Human Landing Systems plume and aero environments team at NASA Marshall. “The data from these tests at NASA Langley will be critical in developing and validating models to predict the effects of plume-surface interaction for landing on the Moon and even Mars, ensuring mission success for the human landing systems and the safety of our astronauts.”
Through the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly complex missions to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, establish an enduring human presence on the lunar surface, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
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