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.
SpaceX/Firefly AerospaceWeek 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.
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Week 2: Blue marbles and more calibrations
During week 2 of the mission, Blue Ghost executed its second engine burn, adjusting its orbit around Earth once again. Its new orbit allowed the lander to capture some truly incredible imagery, as seen above and in this video. Most of week two was spent adjusting its orbit and continuing to calibrate its various payloads. After two weeks in space, Blue Ghost had traveled 715,000 miles and sent more than 7 gigabytes of data back to Earth.
Blue Ghost also captured its first pictures of its eventual destination -- the moon.
Week 3: Most epic selfie ever
Week 3 was more of the same, with calibrations of lunar payloads nearing completion and more preparations being made to travel to the moon. The mundane routine of preparing didn't stop the lander from seeing some cool stuff. For example, during its preparations, the lander took a selfie of itself with Earth in the background. It's not every day we see a selfie containing 8 billion people.
Blue Ghost takes a selfie with quite literally everyone on Earth at once.
Firefly AerospaceThe 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 first image of the moon from Blue Ghost. The moon is on its side here with the south pole on the left.
Firefly AerospaceWeek 5: Hello, moon
On Feb. 13, Blue Ghost entered into orbit with the moon after a 4-minute, 15-second lunar orbit insertion engine burn. Firefly Aerospace describes it as the most challenging burn to date, and further adjustments will be made in the coming days to stabilize the orbit while also changing it from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit.
Once it arrived, the lander took plenty of pictures of our nearest celestial neighbor. From here, Blue Ghost will spend the next two weeks in lunar orbit, awaiting its chance to land and start performing its various experiments. The expected landing date is March 2.
Week 7: Soft landing
On March 2, Blue Ghost made its landing at the moon's Mare Crisium within its 100-meter target, where it will begin surface operations over 14 days including subsurface drilling, X-ray imaging and dust mitigation experiments, Firefly said. The company is also looking ahead to capturing dramatic new photos, including of a total eclipse on March 14 and a lunar sunset on March 16.
Firefly's achievement comes one year after another commercial company, Intuitive Machines, brought the US back to the moon's surface for the first time since the 1970s. But its Odyssey spacecraft landed awkwardly, perhaps tipped over on its side, and was operational for only a handful of days.
The Earth as seen from Blue Ghost on its way to the moon.
Firefly AerospaceThe 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
- Water electrolyzer equipment from Takasago Thermal Engineering
- A self-contained module for food production experiments from Euglena
- A deep space radiation probe developed by the Department of Space Science and Engineering at the National Central University in Taiwan
- A commemorative alloy plate modeled after "Charter of the Universal Century" developed by the Bandai Namco Research Institute
- The ispace Tenacious micro rover developed by ispace-Europe
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