1. One Small Lander, Ten Instruments, About Two Weeks of Daylight
The lander is called Blue Ghost, built by a US company named Firefly Aerospace. NASA did not build it. Under a NASA program called CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services), NASA pays private companies to carry its experiments to the Moon, a bit like booking space on a delivery truck. Blue Ghost landed on March 2, 2025, in a region of the Moon's Earth-facing side called Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises"), at about 18.6° north, 61.8° east[1][3]. Firefly calls it the first fully successful commercial Moon landing[2].
The short answer to the title is that the ten instruments asked four kinds of questions: What is under the ground? What does the dust do? Can we navigate here the way we do at home? And what does space around the Moon look like? Firefly reports that all ten worked on the surface[2], and a NASA-team abstract at a 2026 science meeting says the same[1].
Daylight on the Moon lasts roughly two weeks at a time, and so does the night. A solar-powered lander depends on sunlight, so its working time is limited. Blue Ghost worked for more than 14 days (346 hours of daylight) and then kept going for just over 5 hours after sunset, before the cold night shut it down[2]. In that time it sent home more than 119 gigabytes of data, 51 of them science and technology data[2][4]. Dividing the published figures gives roughly 43 percent. That share describes the amount of data, not how important it was.
2. LISTER Drilled About a Meter Down to Feel the Moon's Heat
The instrument called LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity) is a drill with temperature sensors. Firefly says it drilled about three feet (a little under a meter) into the surface[2]. The abstract from the NASA team says it measured temperature at eight depths, down to about 1 meter, and calls it the deepest robotic planetary subsurface thermal probe so far[1].
Why take a temperature underground? Heat leaks slowly out of the Moon's interior, and the ground at the surface swings from scorching day to freezing night. Deeper down, the daily swings fade and the steady leak of inner heat is what is left. Measuring how temperature changes with depth is how scientists estimate that heat flow, and heat flow is a clue to what the Moon is made of inside.
One caution: the abstract does not give error bars, and "deepest" is the team's own comparison, which the abstract does not spell out. The temperature data are the real result, and scientists will be studying them for a long time.
3. Two Instruments Studied the Moon's Inside Without Digging
Digging a meter is hard on the Moon. Looking deeper takes cleverer tools. LMS (Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder) measured natural electric and magnetic fields using four electrodes on tethers, stretching up to 60 feet (about 18 meters) from the lander[2]. How easily the ground conducts electricity changes with depth and with what the rock is made of, so those two fields together give scientists a way to study the Moon's interior without digging. The abstract reports that the conductivity profile under the lander looks very similar to the one under the Apollo 12 landing site, and the authors suggest this fits the idea that volcanic activity on that side of the Moon was not driven by extra heat-producing elements[1]. That is an interpretation based on a comparison with one other place, so it is a lead to check, not a settled fact.
The other instrument, NGLR (Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector), is a mirror array that bounces laser light straight back to where it came from. Observatories on Earth fired lasers at it, and the abstract says it returned light for thousands of separate distance measurements[1]. Timing how long the light takes to go there and back gives the Earth–Moon distance very precisely. This is the general principle of laser ranging; this article's sources do not say what NGLR's results will reveal about the Moon. It is a new version of the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left on the Moon.
4. Several Instruments Tackled Moon Dust, the Surface's Biggest Nuisance
The Moon is covered in a fine, sharp-edged powder called regolith. Apollo crews found it clung to everything. A spacecraft that stays for weeks has to cope with it, and Blue Ghost carried several instruments for exactly that:
- SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies) took more than 9,000 images, including during the descent, to show how the engine's exhaust blasts the surface. It kept working through the lunar day and sunset, and into the night[1]. Seeing how much dust a landing stirs up helps planners design safer landings.
- EDS (Electrodynamic Dust Shield) uses electric fields to lift dust off a surface. The abstract says it lifted and removed regolith from surfaces, which the team calls a promising answer for future missions[1]. Firefly says it cleared glass and radiator surfaces[2].
- RAC (Regolith Adherence Characterization) checked how dust sticks to different materials, to help test materials for spacecraft, spacesuits, and habitats[2].
- LPV (Lunar PlanetVac) used a puff of pressurized nitrogen gas to collect, move, and sort loose regolith, a possible low-cost way for robots to gather samples[2].
Then there was the question the Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan raised in 1972, when he sketched a faint glow along the lunar horizon. One idea is that sunlight might lift dust off the ground, which would make a thin hazy glow. On March 16, Blue Ghost photographed the lunar sunset and sent NASA data that scientists can use to look at how dust behaves near the horizon[2][4]. The sources describe the pictures as data for NASA to study. They do not say that levitating dust was confirmed. As far as these sources show, that question is still open.
6. What Did the Other Two Instruments Watch Besides the Ground?
LEXI (Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager) looked back at Earth. It captured X-ray images of where the solar wind, a stream of particles from the Sun, meets Earth's magnetic field, and also measured the thin gas around the Moon[1]. Seeing that boundary from outside is a bit like watching a storm's shape from a plane instead of from your backyard[2]. It helps scientists understand space weather.
RadPC (Radiation Tolerant Computer) is a test of a computer that can survive radiation. It was running through Earth's Van Allen radiation belts on the way, in lunar orbit, and on the surface[1].
During the eclipse of March 14 (U.S. time), Firefly's announcement says LMS, RAC, and SCALPSS were all working while Earth blocked the Sun[2]. That gives the diamond-ring photo a second job: not only a beautiful view, but a moment when instruments were running during a sudden change in sunlight.
7. What Is Still Unknown, and How to Look for the Landing Area Yourself
Most of the ten instruments are described by the people who built them, in a conference abstract and in company announcements. Independent studies of the data will take longer. The sources do not say exactly how much of the interior or dust story is settled, so treat words like "promising" and "first" as the teams' own descriptions.
You can find the general area yourself. On a clear night with a full or nearly full Moon, Mare Crisium is a dark, oval patch near the Moon's upper-right edge when viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. Blue Ghost landed there. You cannot see a lander from Earth, not even with binoculars, but binoculars will show the sea's outline well. Go outside with an adult and watch your footing in the dark.
If this made you curious, the best next stop is the original sources below. Firefly's mission page lists all ten instruments and who built them, and the conference abstract is short enough to read in a few minutes.