On 15 January, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission One will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission, which the team named Ghost Riders in the Sky, will carry 10 science and technology payloads to the Moon on the Blue Ghost lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
This is the largest number of NASA payloads on board a CLPS mission to date, said Ryan Watkins, a NASA program scientist for the Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office, during a 17 December press briefing.
“The NASA payloads on Firefly Blue Ghost Mission One will help advance lunar research and conduct several first of their kind demonstrations, strengthening our understanding of the Moon’s environment, as well as helping prepare for human missions to the lunar surface,” Watkins said.
Old Borrowed Instrument, New Science
Blue Ghost aims to land near a volcanic feature named Mons Latreille in Mare Crisium, a 556-meter-wide (345-mile-wide) basin on the Moon’s nearside. The site is ideal for studying lunar regolith and the Moon’s internal properties.
“With 10 NASA instruments on this flight, we are looking at scientific investigations ranging from characterizing Earth’s magnetosphere to understanding the structure, composition, and thermal properties of the Moon’s interior,” Watkins said. The landing site avoids large magnetic anomalies on the lunar surface, which could complicate magnetosphere observations, she added.
The instrument responsible for those observations, the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, or LEXI, has been to space before.
In 2012, the instrument, then called STORM (Sheath Transport Observer for the Redistribution of Mass), launched on a sounding rocket and collected X-ray images of the solar wind interacting with the terrestrial magnetosphere. After falling back to Earth, the instrument sat in a display case at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The NASA team saw an opportunity to restore and refurbish the instrument, giving it new purpose to observe Earth’s ever-shifting magnetosphere from a more expansive vantage point on the lunar surface.
“Lunar dust can affect mechanical components, Earth-based materials degradation, and human health, so we need to know how to account for its effects.”
The lander will also test lunar navigation systems and radiation-resistant computing technologies that could aid future lunar astronauts, demonstrate a new technique for collecting regolith samples (that there are no plans to retrieve and return to Earth), and investigate the properties of lunar dust.
“Lunar dust can affect mechanical components, Earth-based materials degradation, and human health, so we need to know how to account for its effects,” Watkins said. “Several payloads on board will help us study how lunar dust adheres to various materials, as well as test the usage of electromagnetism to mitigate or prevent dust buildup.”
Long Flight with Glowing Finish
The Blue Ghost lander will take 45 days to reach the Moon. After spending 25 days in Earth’s orbit to calibrate and test its systems, it will spend 4 days flying to the Moon and another 16 days in lunar orbit before attempting to land.
Watkins said that some of the onboard instruments, in particular those studying navigation and radiation-tolerant computing, will operate during the transit phases and a stereo camera will be studying the effect of rocket plumes on lunar regolith during landing. The team expects to receive images from the surface approximately 30 minutes after landing. The lander will operate for a full lunar day, or 14 Earth days.
“We’ll then wrap up the mission by capturing a solar eclipse and a lunar sunset in high-definition video, before operating several hours into the lunar night,” Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said during the briefing. “We expect to capture a phenomenon seen and documented by Eugene Cernan during his final steps on Apollo 17, where he observed a horizon glow as the lunar dust levitated on the surface.”
Also unseen since Apollo 17: nominal (successful) Moon landings by U.S.-based missions.
“The CLPS initiative has become the bedrock of commercial lunar innovation.”
“As a nation, we haven’t successfully stuck a landing on the Moon in over 52 years,” Kim said. Missions from China (with Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4) and India (with Chandrayaan-3) have recently made nominal soft landings on the Moon. Though a CLPS mission by Intuitive Machines landed softly on the Moon in 2024, it was tipped at an unplanned 30° angle, which hindered its operations and scientific output.
Blue Ghost’s chosen landing site is expected to be relatively flat and free of debris. The team is hoping for that elusive perfect landing.
“The CLPS initiative has become the bedrock of commercial lunar innovation,” Kim said. “It just shows that the private industry, the commercial world, has a lot of affordable, responsive technology and systems that could provide NASA a frequent means to go to the Moon and carry out all these high stakes, critical science missions for lower costs, as well as do it sustainably,” he added.
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer
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