Zeno Power is ready to pull its first all-nighter.
On Wednesday, the nuclear-energy startup announced a commercial payload agreement with Firefly Aerospace ($FLY) to send a radioisotope heating unit (RHU) on a Firefly mission launching to the Moon NET 2028.
The mission—flying on Firefly’s CS-8 CLPS mission—aims to demonstrate Zeno’s ability to keep a 5W RHU—dubbed, fittingly, the “Survive-the-Night Package”—functioning during the blistering-cold, 14-day lunar night.
How it works: Lunar missions don’t typically last very long. With temperatures dropping below-133°C during the lunar night, payloads quickly freeze to death. To stay safe during periods of darkness, and to explore the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions, lunar tech needs a powerful night-light.
Zeno’s solution uses a radioisotope fuel—Americium-241—which gives off heat as the fuel decays. The idea is to harness this heat to keep payloads up and running, no matter the outside temp.
On its first mission, Zeno’s RHU will be self-contained—warming the unit to keep its comms, power, data handling, and thermal management infrastructure running—while the rest of Firefly’s payloads are frozen into “monument mode.”
If all goes well, however, future lunar missions could incorporate several RHUs to keep multiple payloads, or the entire lunar lander, functioning in the dark.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” Firefly Director of Spacecraft Mission Management Farah Zuberi told Payload. “We’re going to have a lot of learnings throughout the [demo mission], and then incorporate them into future missions, depending on what we learn.”
Warming to the idea: While the mission has big implications for the commercial future of the Moon—helping Firefly sell longer-duration missions to customers, and gather its own data over longer stretches of time on the surface—it’s been driven by NASA’s broader ambitions for the Moon. Zeno’s demo is a direct result of NASA’s CLPS CS-8 task order, which included a financial incentive for contractors who can demonstrate “survive-the-night” capabilities.
To win this bonus—the value of which Zeno declined to share—the RHU will need to send a signal back to Earth after 120 Earth hours of lunar night, but the system is expected to last a lot longer than that, according to Zeno CEO Tyler Bernstein.
“We are building to meet that requirement of 120 hours. But Americium has a half-life of 440 years,” Bernstein told Payload. “We believe this will prove out the technology that in the future, we’ll be able to demonstrate years of operations on the lunar surface.”
Zeno is also developing a larger Stirling radioisotope generator to one day provide both heat and electricity to lunar payloads, according to Bernstein.
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