PlanetVac Pneumatic Surface Sampling System
Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
Pneumatic regolith sampling system with one moving part — fires a gas blast from the lander footpad to collect, sieve, and transfer surface material. First lunar demonstration March 2025 on Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1.
Key figurescomparable across the catalogue
- Mass
- 0.02 kg
Normalised to common units so this product can be compared with others in its category. The supplier's own wording is below.
As published by the supplier
- Sampling method
- Pneumatic (pressurized gas blast)
- Working fluid
- Nitrogen gas
- Operating pressure (demonstrated)
- 6 psia
- Moving parts
- 1 (gas release valve)
- Sample mass per event
- >20 g regolith
- Excavation efficiency
- ~1:6,000 (g gas : g regolith)
- Gravity environment tested
- 1/6 G (lunar equivalent)
- Integration point
- Lander footpad (no deployment arm)
- Sample sorting
- Integrated particle-size sieves
- First lunar demonstration
- 2 March 2025 (Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1, NASA CLPS)
- Ongoing missions
- JAXA MMX (Phobos pneumatic sampler)
- Applicable bodies
- Moon, Mars, asteroids, small moons
About
PlanetVac is a novel surface sampling system designed to collect planetary regolith using pneumatic pressure rather than mechanical scoops or drills. The system fires a brief, controlled blast of pressurized nitrogen gas into the surface directly beneath a lander’s footpad, lofting regolith upward into a collection chamber integral to the lander leg structure. The entire process takes seconds, requires no deployment arm or excavation mechanism, and has just one moving part: the valve that releases the gas. This extreme mechanical simplicity makes PlanetVac exceptionally low-mass, low-cost, and high-reliability relative to traditional sampling approaches.
In vacuum chamber testing at 1/6 G, PlanetVac demonstrated an excavation efficiency ratio of approximately 1:6,000 — meaning 1 gram of nitrogen gas at 6 psia lofted approximately 6,000 grams of JSC-1a lunar soil simulant — and successfully transferred more than 20 grams of regolith into collection tubes per sampling event. The system incorporates integrated particle-size sieves within the collection chamber for on-site sample sorting, delivering fractionated samples to scientific instruments for in-situ analysis or to a cache for potential return.
Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) achieved its first operational demonstration on the Moon on 2 March 2025 as part of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 (NASA CLPS), demonstrating successful collection, transfer, and sorting of lunar regolith — the first in-situ pneumatic sampling demonstration on the lunar surface. PlanetVac technology is also being adapted for JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission for sample collection from Phobos, and The Planetary Society has been a long-standing development and advocacy partner.
PlanetVac’s architecture is adaptable across planetary environments — the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and small moons — by scaling gas pressure and collection chamber geometry to local gravity and regolith properties. Footpad integration eliminates the dedicated sampling deployment mechanism, reducing mission system complexity and mass budget requirements.
Documentation
No public datasheet yet — request the datasheet / ICD from the supplier.