A commercial lander that will be at the forefront of NASA’s efforts to establish a Moon Base, humanity’s first lunar outpost, has passed a series of critical tests at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The tests simulated the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, as well as the intense shaking and ear-splitting roar of launch. Results show that Voyager Technologies’ Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1) spacecraft is ready to survive the rigors of space exploration.

As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative within the Moon Base Program, Griffin-1 is expected to launch later this year aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will deliver more than 1,100 pounds (455 kilograms) of cargo to Nobile Crater near the lunar South Pole, which categorizes it as an infrastructure-class lander. Griffin-1 will carry 10 science and technology demonstrations from six countries, including the largest commercial payload ever delivered to the Moon, Astrolab’s FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover.

“NASA JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory has been putting robotic explorers to the test since the Ranger program gave us NASA’s first up-close views of the Moon’s surface in the mid-1960s. We’re proud to provide our expertise and facilities to support this new phase of commercial lunar exploration,” said Charles Whetsel, manager, Exploration Systems Development Office at JPL.

Griffin-1’s testing journey

Testing began in July after the 2,789-pound (1,265-kilogram) spacecraft took a cross-country road trip from Voyager Lunar Systems’ manufacturing facilities in Pittsburgh to JPL in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. Engineers spun the spacecraft on a special table to measure its mass properties, a test that enables them to look for any unexpected wobbles as they assess how the lander will move through space. Data gathered in mass properties testing is key to understanding the spacecraft’s readiness for navigation in flight and landing on the lunar surface.

To make sure signals from the spacecraft’s electronic components don’t interfere with one another, Griffin-1 underwent electromagnetic interference and electromagnetic compatibility testing inside what’s called an anechoic chamber, in which long foam spikes line the walls to absorb sound and electromagnetic waves.

During vibration testing, hundreds of sensors monitored Griffin-1 as a “shaker table” rattled it in three directions, with increasingly intense force, to simulate the ride out of Earth’s atmosphere on a massive rocket. To mimic the roar of launch, giant horns, powered by compressed nitrogen gas, blasted the spacecraft with up to 153 decibels inside a sealed acoustic chamber.

Environmental testing took place in several clean-room facilities at JPL, culminating in the 25-Foot Space Simulator, a thermal vacuum chamber listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its role in supporting historic missions like those of the Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, and Voyager programs. Dozens of other missions (along with plenty of upgrades to the testing facility) have followed over the decades, including the Perseverance Mars rover and Europa Clipper.

Beneath the thermal vacuum chamber’s soaring 85-foot (26-meter) ceiling, for about two weeks, Griffin-1 alternately baked at up to 167 degrees Fahrenheit (75 degrees Celsius) and froze at temperatures as low as minus 148 F (minus 100 C). This testing simulates the temperature extremes the lander will experience during its journey through the vacuum of space and its operations on the lunar surface.

“Griffin-1 is being built for a historic purpose: to deliver the infrastructure and capabilities to the Moon. Seeing the spacecraft complete this demanding environmental testing is a major milestone because it demonstrates that Griffin-1 is ready for the extreme journey ahead: launch, through deep space, to the lunar South Pole,” said John Thornton, executive vice president, Voyager. “This spacecraft represents a new era of commercial lunar exploration, where missions like Griffin-1 are laying the groundwork for the Moon Base and helping turn sustained lunar exploration from a vision into a reality.”

After proving its mettle at JPL, Griffin-1 has returned to Voyager Lunar Systems’ facility for final assembly. Next up: launch-readiness operations before shipment to Cape Canaveral.

To learn more about the Moon Base, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase

Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-071

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) space telescope is shedding light on brown dwarfs, celestial objects that blur the line between stars and exoplanets. New findings published in The Astrophysical Journal show that these dark and cloudy worlds have chemically rich atmospheres not unlike the giant planets in our own solar system. 

First discovered in the 1990s, brown dwarfs form from collapsing clouds of gas, like stars do, but they aren’t hefty enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores. These dimly glowing balls of warm gas also share characteristics with Jupiter and Saturn. In contrast to most planets, however, brown dwarfs drift in darkness, ungoverned by a host star and heated entirely from within.

“They’re kind of goth,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, lead author of the new study and a scientist at IPAC, Caltech’s science and data center in Pasadena, California. “Unlike exoplanets, free-floating brown dwarfs are completely independent celestial objects that will fade into eternity alone. We’re still learning how complex they are.”

Only a few dozen of these “dark wanderers” have been studied in detail with space-based telescopes. Astronomers want to observe more of them in the wild because much of our understanding of their makeup, storminess, and evolution comes from theoretical models.

Enter NASA’s SPHEREx, an infrared space telescope launched in March 2025 and managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The study authors analyzed SPHEREx observations of 37 nearby brown dwarfs spanning the full brown dwarf temperature range, from about 4,000 to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 to minus 20 degrees Celsius). The telescope measures their brightness in 102 different colors, from the deepest red our eyes can see, to the invisible heat of infrared light, creating a spectrum. These spectra revealed to the study authors chemically rich atmospheres harboring water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane.

“We’re seeing the signatures of these molecules and how they change from object to object across the entire temperature regime,” said study coauthor J. Davy Kirkpatrick, a scientist at Caltech’s IPAC. “Our paper concentrated on just three dozen, but we have thousands more that we are in the process of analyzing. I really want to see what bounds the universe places on the variety of brown dwarfs.”

“From orbit, SPHEREx sees wavelengths of light that are basically impossible to see with telescopes on the ground because water in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them,” Rustamkulov said. “We are picking up light from the deep, red clouds of brown dwarfs all over the sky.”

Sweet spot

Spotting brown dwarfs is something of a side project for SPHEREx. The space telescope takes about 3,600 unique images per day to stitch into maps of the entire sky. Knowing where hundreds of millions of galaxies are distributed across the cosmos will help scientists reconstruct what happened in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang. As it scans the sky, the telescope also is searching for the chemical ingredients of life and finding interstellar ice that could one day seed oceans on distant worlds.

For years, brown dwarfs have been spotted by other observatories, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and retired Spitzer Space Telescope. But thanks to its spectral coverage, SPHEREx is now imaging thousands of them for the first time in a fruitful region of the electromagnetic spectrum that spans deep red and infrared wavelengths of light.

At those wavelengths, molecules carve out distinct absorption patterns in the light shining out to space. The patterns change as brown dwarfs grow older and colder. Some of the brown dwarfs observed by SPHEREx are in a dynamic stage of life when their exotic clouds thin out, giving way to methane-rich atmospheres.

“The state-of-the-art models are capturing the general chemical trend, but when it comes to these cloudy transitions, the models are struggling to match the data,” said Rustamkulov. “No two brown dwarfs are alike. Even at the same temperature, their spectra look quite distinct.”

“The findings are a call to action to explore even more of these dark worlds,” said Kirkpatrick. “This journey has turned many of us into accidental meteorologists. We know how hard it is to predict weather on our own planet, and we realize it’s going to be just as challenging to explain the phenomena we see in these bizarre, cold objects.”

More about SPHEREx

The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the United States and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Jamie Bock, principal investigator, who is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL’s Olivier Doré, the project scientist. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/

-end-

Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Sally Younger

2026-069