United States - March 07, 2025 [Note: no sound] On the dusty plains of the Moon, a groundbreaking mission is underway. Following Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 Moon landing on March 2, NASA’s LISTER has kicked into action. This state-of-the-art gadget, dubbed Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity, is drilling deep to unravel the secrets of Earth’s closest cosmic neighbor. The Moon, a 4.5-billion-year-old rock floating just beyond our planet, remains a mystery. Humans have only explored 5% of its surface. It wasn’t until 2023, using Apollo-era data and NASA’s GRAIL mission from 2011-2012, that boffins confirmed it hides a liquid outer core around a solid inner one. Now, as NASA gears up for Artemis missions and future Mars trips, understanding the Moon’s fiery insides is key to keeping astronauts safe. LISTER, born from a collaboration between Texas Tech University in Lubbock and Honeybee Robotics in California, is no ordinary tool. Its slick pneumatic drill will burrow three meters into the lunar soil. Every half-meter, it pauses, poking a thermal probe into the dirt to measure heat flow—tracking temperature shifts and how well the ground conducts heat. “By making similar measurements at multiple locations, we can reconstruct the thermal evolution of the Moon,” said Dr. Seiichi Nagihara, the mission’s top brain and a Texas Tech geophysics whiz. He reckons this will reveal how the Moon cooled from a molten blob into the cratered wonder we know today. This isn’t just about science bragging rights. LISTER’s success could spark smarter drilling tech for the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It’s all part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services push, with Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 hauling 10 payloads to the surface. Managed partly by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, the mission aims to boost lunar know-how and pave the way for humans to live and work up there.