Rover Developer And Space Data Firm Plan Joint Lunar Monitoring Mission
Agreement Follows Recent NASA Selection For Lunar Dust Instrument
A Budapest-based lunar rover developer and a space-environment data company signed a memorandum of understanding Wednesday to explore a joint mission that would place environmental sensors on the lunar surface.
“A rover-based mission allows us to measure how the local environment changes across terrain, illumination conditions, rover activity and selected surface locations.”
Mary Glaz, Mission Space
Puli Space Technologies, of Budapest, Hungary, and Mission Space, based in Miami, said the agreement would pair Puli Space’s rover platform with Mission Space instruments designed to measure radiation, charged particles, dust behavior and surface charging on the moon. The companies announced the MOU in a joint news release distributed Wednesday by PR Newswire.
The memorandum is nonbinding. It commits the two companies only to evaluate a mission concept, and the release did not disclose a timeline, funding source or target launch date for any resulting mission.
The agreement follows Mission Space’s selection by NASA under an Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity to develop its lunar dust and surface-charging monitoring instrument with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, according to the release. Mission Space said it is extending measurement methods already used in Earth orbit to lunar surface operations, where dust and charging effects can influence rovers, landers, habitats, power systems and astronaut activity.
NASA is separately funding a comparable dust-and-plasma monitoring effort of its own: DUSTER, a rover-mounted instrument suite led by University of Colorado Boulder researcher Xu Wang, under a $24.8 million contract for the Artemis IV mission to the lunar south pole.
NASA unveiled its “Ignition” initiative in March, a set of programs implementing the administration’s national space policy following a December 2025 executive order on space capability. Among them is a Moon Base effort that NASA has said is aimed at a permanent lunar outpost by 2030, encompassing new procurements for lunar terrain vehicles, commercial payload deliveries and surface technology demonstrations.
Under the concept the companies intend to study, Puli Space’s rover would provide mobility, surface access, terrain context and mission operations support, while Mission Space instruments would collect measurements along the rover’s traverse and at selected sites.
“Mission Space is focused on turning lunar environmental measurements into an operational data layer for the moon,” said Mary Glaz, CEO of Mission Space. “A rover-based mission allows us to measure how the local environment changes across terrain, illumination conditions, rover activity and selected surface locations.”
“Puli Space was founded to make Hungary part of the next chapter of lunar exploration,” said Tibor Pacher, CEO of Puli Space. “Our Puli Lunar Water Snooper — winner of NASA’s ‘Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload’ award and flown to the lunar south pole under an ESA contract — has already returned data from the lunar surface. This collaboration with Mission Space is a natural next step: pairing rover mobility with environmental measurements.”
The Water Snooper, a neutron spectrometer, flew to the moon’s south pole region aboard Intuitive Machines’ second commercial lunar lander mission. Separately, the European Space Agency’s Lunar Science Office signed what it called its first exploration data-buy agreement with Puli Space to acquire and analyze the instrument’s data.
The companies also intend to explore a joint commercial lunar surface data product combining Mission Space’s environmental measurements with Puli Space’s rover positioning, traverse and operations data.