Sunday’s Moon Landing Could Fulfill a Texas Tech Professor’s Dream—or End in a Nightmare

On the surface, Seiichi Nagihara’s mood seems placid, yet there’s tension beneath the answers the Texas Tech professor offers about the fate of his invention. The device now sits aboard a lander called Blue Ghost, circling the moon, about 244,190 miles from Nagihara’s Lubbock office.Cedar Park–based Firefly Aerospace, which built Blue Ghost, has dubbed this mission “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” It’s a nod to the nature of the mission, carrying ten instruments—the “riders”—that will conduct NASA-sanctioned scientific experiments on the lunar surface.Nagihara’s contribution is a probe—a platinum thermometer embedded in the end of a custom-made drill bit. The device aims to gather reams of data about the moon’s interior, which could unravel mysteries about the celestial body’s formation, and catalog the underground material that…

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