Pasadena-Designed Drones Will Scout the Moon Before Astronauts Arrive

The laboratory that flew a helicopter on Mars is now building four drones to hop across the Moon.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is designing and constructing the propulsive drones at the center of MoonFall, a mission to survey the lunar South Pole ahead of astronaut landings planned for as early as 2028. The drones — each about seven feet across, four feet tall and weighing roughly 550 pounds with propellant — will carry as many as 10 high-definition cameras apiece and a suite of science instruments to map terrain where no human has set foot. Firefly Aerospace announced on May 26 that it was awarded a $75 million subcontract from JPL to deliver the four drones to the Moon aboard its Elytra spacecraft, with launch targeted for no earlier than 2028.

The technology traces directly to Ingenuity, the JPL-built helicopter that completed 72 flights on Mars before its mission ended in 2024.

“We get to stand on their shoulders,” said Ray Baker, the project lead for MoonFall at JPL. “We’re going to marry our success from Ingenuity, all that knowledge, all that skill and success, and couple that with an industry capability. We’re going to get this done.”

MoonFall is part of the initial phase of NASA’s Moon Base initiative, a series of robotic missions to scout, experiment and prepare the lunar surface for sustained human operations. NASA announced nearly $1 billion in Moon Base contracts on May 26 at its headquarters in Washington, awarding work to four companies: Astrolab ($219 million) and Lunar Outpost ($220 million) for lunar terrain vehicles, Blue Origin ($188 million) for lander delivery, and Firefly Aerospace ($75 million), through JPL, for the MoonFall drones.

For Pasadena, the mission represents a direct line from the city’s decades-long role in planetary exploration to NASA’s most ambitious lunar campaign since Apollo.

Once launched, Firefly’s Elytra spacecraft will carry the drones on a 45-day transit to the Moon and enter lunar orbit. It will then deorbit and perform a braking maneuver, releasing the drones approximately 50 kilometers — about 31 miles — above the South Pole. Each drone will land individually and operate independently, making multiple propulsive hops over the course of a single lunar day, the equivalent of about 14 Earth days.

Baker said each drone is designed to cover roughly 30 miles of terrain. With four drones carrying as many as 10 cameras each — as many as 40 cameras in total — the imagery will be stitched together to form an unprecedented view of the moonscape, according to Baker.

“Our goal is that each drone can cover a range of roughly 30 miles and get that done by the end of 2028,” Baker said.

Beyond cameras, the drones will carry a neutron spectrometer to help determine the abundance of subsurface water, a laser retroflector array for precisely locating the drones, navigation, and potential geophysical experiments, and a spectrometer to characterize the radiation environment for future human exploration, according to JPL’s mission description. The imaging system, which JPL calls the Lunar Dashcam, is designed to produce digital terrain maps at significantly higher resolution than current satellite imagery, JPL said.

When the lunar night falls and freezing temperatures disable the drones’ remaining fuel, each will activate a long-duration survive-the-night payload at its final landing site. Those payloads are designed to wake up and communicate with Earth during subsequent lunar daytime periods, marking what NASA describes as a sustained U.S. presence at the South Pole.

The concept of deploying drones mid-descent — rather than landing them on a full propulsive lander — avoids significant cost and risk, Baker said.

“NASA is still working out details of cost and budget, so we can’t provide those details just yet,” Baker said. “But we’re confident that, in partnership with industry, JPL has the skills and the technology to deliver on schedule.”

Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said in a company statement that the subcontract builds on the company’s experience landing on the Moon. Firefly’s Blue Ghost spacecraft completed the first fully successful commercial Moon landing in March 2025.

“This subcontract underscores our commitment to executing challenging missions that push the boundaries of lunar exploration,” Kim said in the statement. “Built upon the same proven systems that landed Blue Ghost on the Moon, our Elytra spacecraft are equipped to deploy critical high-mass payloads across cislunar space.”

Development is already underway. Baker said MoonFall prototype hardware is in hand or now in work, with captive carry tests of navigational and control sensors planned for later this year. Spacecraft integration and testing are slated for late summer 2027, followed by delivery to the launch site in 2028.

“It’s going to be fast-paced,” Baker said. “We believe we can do it.”

The announcement comes less than two months after Artemis II, the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years, splashed down on April 10. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who outlined the Moon Base initiative at an event called Ignition on March 24, has pushed for an accelerated timeline to establish a permanent lunar presence.

“The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” Isaacman said at the May 26 announcement. “This time the goal is not flags and footprints. This time the goal is to stay.”

The drones will be built in the same Pasadena lab complex where Ingenuity was designed, tested and proven before it hitched a ride to Mars. That helicopter, a four-pound rotorcraft, was never expected to fly more than five times. It flew 72.

Now JPL is scaling up the idea — from a rotorcraft that weighed less than a bag of sugar to four 550-pound propulsive drones on the Moon. The destination is different. The ambition is familiar.