On Friday 26 June 2026, Luxembourg-based startup Mission Space announced that it had been selected by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate under the Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity (ACO) programme to develop LEEMR, a compact instrument for monitoring lunar dust and surface charging, in collaboration with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
According to the startup, the project marks the company's expansion from orbital space weather intelligence to lunar surface environmental monitoring.
The selection comes as NASA advances its Ignition strategy to accelerate lunar surface capabilities, including sustained Moon operations, commercial lunar infrastructure and more frequent surface missions, said Mission Space.
LEEMR is built for the conditions lunar assets will face on the surface. Dust behavior changes with local electric fields, solar wind interaction, landing activity, rover movement, astronaut activity and nearby charged structures. The instrument measures surface charge accumulation, dust density variation and dust charging levels in real time around landers, rovers, habitats, tools, power systems and surface stations.
Mission Space said it is developing LEEMR as part of a broader lunar environmental monitoring architecture: compact instruments deployed near operational assets to provide local data for infrastructure protection; hazard modeling; and mission planning.
Mission Space explained that the project builds on existing space-weather hardware and software heritage. LEEMR reuses validated electronics and autonomous measurement components from Mission Space's ZOHAR radiation monitoring payloads, reducing development risk and supporting maturation toward a flight-ready instrument design.
"Upcoming Artemis and commercial lunar missions are putting landers, rovers, payloads, power systems and crews on the lunar surface," said Mary Glaz, CEO and co-founder of Mission Space. "They need data to design missions and real-time warnings tied to actual mission conditions: asset location, surface activity, dust behavior, charging and radiation changes around the hardware," she added.
"We are proud to collaborate with NASA through this STMD selection," said Alex Shirobokov, Luxembourg GM and co-founder of Mission Space. He continued: "For our Luxembourg team, LEEMR represents the kind of space infrastructure Europe should help build: compact, operational hardware that supports safer and more measurable lunar surface activity."
