On the first Friday of every month, Brian Jackson works late. The Boise State physics professor stays on campus well past standard business hours, not to grade papers or run lab experiments, but to welcome strangers into a lecture hall and then lead them out under the night sky. For a decade now, that ritual has been the heartbeat of First Friday Astronomy, a public lecture series that the university's Department of Physics and Astronomy has built into one of Boise's more unusual recurring traditions.
On October 2, 2026, the series continues with a talk that reaches from the Moon to Mars and back down to the subatomic scale. Dr. Craig Hardgrove, an associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration, will present "Hunting for Water on the Moon and Mars with Neutrons." The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. Mountain Time in room 106 of the Liberal Arts Building at 1874 University Drive. It is free, open to the public, and supported by donations.
The title is not a metaphor. Hardgrove studies the Moon and Mars using neutron and gamma-ray instruments, and his specialty is a deceptively simple idea: when cosmic rays strike a planetary surface, the way neutrons scatter and slow down reveals what is hiding in the top meter of soil. Hydrogen is a particularly effective neutron moderator, so a deficit of fast-moving neutrons escaping a patch of ground is a telltale sign of hydrogen — and hydrogen, bound up in water ice and hydrated minerals, is exactly what planetary scientists are hunting for at the lunar poles.
Hardgrove is well positioned to explain the hunt. He was the principal investigator of NASA's LunaH-Map mission, the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, a spacecraft the size of a large shoebox that flew to the Moon aboard Artemis I. The mission's goal was ambitious for a craft that small: to map hydrogen abundances at scales below 10 kilometers near the lunar south pole, teasing out the relationship between water ice and the permanently shadowed craters where it can survive. The team built a novel neutron spectrometer around a scintillator material called CLYC, chosen because it could achieve sufficient detection efficiency within a CubeSat's tight mass and power budget. LunaH-Map launched on November 16, 2022, as one of ten CubeSats riding along with the Space Launch System's first flight.
The mission's story did not unfold as planned. A stuck valve in the spacecraft's propulsion system left LunaH-Map stranded in the wrong orbit, unable to maneuver into the low-perilune path that would have let it make its more than 140 close passes over the south pole. NASA ceased operations in May 2023 and formally declared the mission over that August. But the agency emphasized that LunaH-Map had still achieved a central objective: its neutron spectrometer proved it could detect water and ice at the lunar surface, validating the instrument's performance even as the spacecraft missed its mapping campaign. Lori Glaze, then director of NASA's planetary science division, noted that such small missions "are inherently risky, as they are designed to test the bounds of what can be achieved with lower-cost missions."
That hard-won validation is feeding directly into what comes next. Hardgrove is now helping build a neutron and gamma-ray instrument for NASA's Lunar-VISE rover, which is slated to launch in late 2028 to study the Gruithuisen Domes — unusual silicic volcanic features on the Moon whose formation scientists still puzzle over. The Lunar-VISE Gamma Ray Neutron Spectrometer is derived from the instrument Hardgrove's team developed for LunaH-Map. In other words, the October talk is not a postmortem on a failed spacecraft but a look at a technique that is maturing from a shoebox experiment into a rover-borne tool.
That spirit — the sense that planetary science is a long, incremental, occasionally frustrating enterprise — is part of what makes the First Friday series work. The program is spearheaded by Jackson, a first-generation college graduate from Lilburn, Georgia, whose own path into science began with childhood documentaries and a formative summer internship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked with scientists preparing for the Cassini mission to Saturn. He joined Boise State's physics faculty in 2014, and the lecture series took shape in 2016. The university is marking the milestone this fall, billing the season as a celebration of ten years of First Friday Astronomy.
The format has stayed remarkably consistent across that decade. Lectures run in the Liberal Arts Building, room 106, and are open to anyone — no ticket, no enrollment, no prerequisite. The series is donor-supported, and the department points supporters toward its giving page; talks are also live-streamed for those who cannot make it to campus. After each lecture, Jackson invites the audience out onto the Quad for guided stargazing, weather permitting. Student workers set up telescopes and find objects in the night sky, putting distant planets and nebulae into the viewfinders for people who may never have looked through a telescope before.
That pairing of a lecture with actual skywatching is more than a nice touch. Boise State's astronomical observatory, which reopened after a period of construction, now hosts its regular public stargazing sessions only after First Friday lectures, a consequence of staffing limits that has effectively fused the two activities into a single monthly event.
The fall 2026 lineup reflects the range the series has always aimed for. Before Hardgrove's October talk, September brought Jack Kiraly, chief of advocacy at The Planetary Society, to speak on how to become an effective space advocate. After it, in November, Dr. Barbara Cohen, the Artemis III project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, will discuss the science of Artemis, and in December Dr. Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory will talk about Dragonfly, the robotic aerial mission to Titan. It is a schedule that moves from policy to lunar geology to the prebiotic chemistry of a moon of Saturn without ever leaving a single classroom in Boise.
For anyone who has wondered how scientists actually find water on other worlds — or who simply wants an evening of real astronomy followed by a look through a telescope — the October lecture offers a rare combination: a researcher who has flown hardware to the Moon, explaining a technique that reads the chemistry of a planet through the behavior of neutrons, in a room anyone can walk into. It starts at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 2, in the Liberal Arts Building, room 106. Bring a jacket for the Quad afterward.