NASA’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has arrived on the moon’s surface, a striking achievement for Blue Ghost builder Firefly Aerospace and for the US agency’s commercial space program.
The chunky spacecraft touched down “softly” and in an upright, stable position on its very first attempt on March 2, the company announced Sunday. Since the landing, Blue Ghost has been communicating with ground control operations in Cedar Park, Texas.
“Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface with 10 NASA payloads and a plaque with every Firefly employee’s name,” Jason Kim, Firefly CEO, said in a statement. “With annual lunar missions, Firefly is paving the way for a lasting lunar presence that will help unlock access to the rest of the solar system for our nation, our partners, and the world.”
The mission, named Ghost Riders in the Sky, launched on Jan. 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Blue Ghost lander separates from its launch vehicle in Earth orbit on Jan. 15.
Week 1: Calibrations and eclipses
Just a few days after its launch, Blue Ghost captured an eclipse where the Earth passed in front of the sun. The video was taken from the top deck and passes much quicker than on Earth.
Other than that, things went according to plan. Most of the first week was spent calibrating the various payloads and ensuring proper connections were made and stable before the lander’s trip to the moon. In addition, Blue Ghost executed its first engine burn, which adjusted its orbit in preparation for slingshotting away from Earth and heading to the moon.
Blue Ghost takes a selfie with quite literally everyone on Earth at once.
The cameras on the lander also captured another eclipse. This time it was the Earth passing in front of the moon. It’s not a long video, but we’re fairly used to seeing the Earth blocking the sun from the moon and not the Earth blocking the moon from the sun.
Week 4: Road trip
With preparations completed, it was time for Blue Ghost to eject itself from Earth’s orbit and head to the moon. The lander took another selfie, this time with the Earth and the moon together just before it left. Per Firefly Aerospace, Blue Ghost performed a successful trans-lunar injection burn to escape Earth’s orbit and officially began making its way to the moon.
Once the trip began, the lander ran dozens of health checks to ensure all the payloads were functional and made a few trajectory correction maneuvers to ensure that it remained on course.
The Earth as seen from Blue Ghost on its way to the moon.
The Tenacious rover is small but mighty
Along with Blue Ghost, NASA launched the Tenacious lunar rover from Japanese company ispace. It’s one of the smallest planetary rovers ever designed, and it wouldn’t look out of place in an RC car toy shop. Tenacious measures 10 inches tall and weighs just 5 pounds.
Tenacious is part of the second Resilience mission. The first took place in 2022 with the similarly tiny Hakuto-R lander.
Tenacious will land at the Atlas crater in Mare Frigoris and establish a connection with Hakuto-R. That’s how data will make its way back to Earth.
Tenacious will use its equipment to conduct food production experiments, detect radiation, conduct water electrolysis and collect regolith.
What are the mission’s payloads?
In all, there are 15 total payloads — the elements of the spacecraft dedicated to producing and relaying mission data — headed to the moon. Five of them are going with Tenacious and 10 with Blue Ghost.
Blue Ghost payloads
- Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) from Honeybee Robotics
- Lunar PlanetVac (LVP) from Honeybee Robotics
- Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR) from the University of Maryland
- Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) from Aegis Aerospace
- Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) from Montana State University
- Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) from NASA Kennedy Space Center
- Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) from Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Johns Hopkins University
- Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) from the Southwest Research Institute
- Lunar GNSS Receiver Experimental (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) from the NASA Langley Research Center
Resilience payloads
