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WASHINGTON — As NASA evaluates proposals for commercially developed small lunar landers, the agency is now seeking payloads that could fly on those spacecraft despite concerns from some scientists that they don't know if their experiments are compatible with those landers.

NASA released Oct. 18 a formal solicitation for "Lunar Surface Instrument and Technology Payloads" that seeks experiments for flight on lander missions procured by the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. NASA plans to select 8 to 12 experiments next year for launch no earlier than 2020, with an overall budget of between $24 and 36 million in the first year of the program.

In a statement, NASA said it's looking for payloads "that advance capabilities for science, exploration, or commercial development of the moon." That includes, according to the solicitation, work by any of the agency's four science divisions, so-called "Strategic Knowledge Gaps" for human exploration and technologies needed for future lunar exploration.

"We are looking for ways to not only conduct lunar science but to also use the moon as a science platform to look back at the Earth, observe the sun, or view the vast universe," said Steve Clarke, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in the statement. "In terms of technology, we are interested in those instruments or systems that will help future missions — both human and robotic — explore the moon and feed forward to future Mars missions."

However, NASA's statement listed what it expects some of those first payloads to be: "On early missions, science instruments will likely gather data related to heat flow within the Moon's interior, solar wind and atmosphere as well as dust detection."

Source: https://spacenews.com/nasa-issues-call-for-payloads-to-go-on-commercial-lunar-landers/

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