The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander is now on its way to the Moon: Here’s what you need to know

NASA’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is on its way to the moon, flying through space with a tiny lunar rover called Tenacious.

“With all conducted testing and mission simulations completed, we are now fully focused on execution as we seek to complete our operations in orbit, land softly on the lunar surface and pave the way for humanity’s return to the Moon. Jason Kim, CEO of Blue Ghost manufacturer Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement.

The mission, called Ghost Riders in the Sky, started on Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, at 1:11 a.m. ET. Blue Ghost separated from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 2:17 a.m. ET and established communication with Firefly’s Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, Texas, at 2:26 a.m. ET.

Blue Ghost’s main task will be research. It will hang around Earth orbit He took measurements for 25 days and waited for the right time to set off moon. After four days in transit, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descent Big crisisone of the largest pools on the moon.

Once there, it will spend one lunar day – about 14 Earth days – taking measurements 10 NASA payloads. The instruments will measure subsurface thermal data, radiation levels and other planetary details. Blue Ghost will also measure regolith, the loose dirt and sediment that is often deposited on airless planetary bodies like the moon. Regolith research will help reduce dust on future lunar missions.

At the end of his mission, Blue Ghost will take some pictures of the lunar sunset as night falls. The lander is not intended to return to Earth. So once night falls, the lander has about five hours to complete its final actions before going offline. Firefly Aerospace says this should be more than enough time to capture images of the sunset and transmit them back to Earth. Once it goes offline, the story is over for Blue Ghost.

The Tenacious Rover is small but mighty

Together with Blue Ghost, NASA launched this Persistent lunar rover from the Japanese company ispace. It’s one of the smallest planetary rovers ever developed, and it wouldn’t look out of place in one RC car toy store. Tenacious stands 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 small lander Hakuto-R.

Tenacious will land at Atlas Crater in Mare Frigoris and establish a connection with Hakuto-R. This way the data gets back to Earth.

Tenacious will use its equipment to conduct food production experiments, detect radiation, perform water electrolysis, and collect regolith.

What are the mission payloads?

A total of 15 payloads – the elements of the spacecraft responsible for producing and relaying mission data – are on their way to the moon. Five of them go with Tenacious and ten with Blue Ghost.

Blue Ghost payloads

• Lunar instrumentation for high-speed thermal exploration of the subsurface (LISTER) from Honeybee Robotics
• Lunar PlanetVac (LVP) from Honeybee Robotics
• Next generation lunar retroreflector (NGLR) from the University of Maryland
• Characterization of regolith adherence (RAC) from Aegis Aerospace
• Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) from Montana State University
• Electrodynamic dust protection (EDS) from NASA Kennedy Space Center
• Heliospheric X-ray imager for the lunar environment (LEXI) from Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Echo Sounder (LMS) from Southwest Research Institute
• Experimental lunar GNSS receiver (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Stereo camera for lunar plume surface studies (SCALP) from NASA Langley Research Center

Resilience payloads