At 1:11 a.m. Wednesday morning, the sky above Cape Canaveral lit up as a SpaceX Falcon 9 jumped off the launch pad that sent NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo missions.
That was fitting considering that this SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried two lunar landers: ispace’s lightweight lander known as RESILIENCE, and Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which carries ten science and technology payloads for NASA.
Once safely in orbit, Blue Ghost will be deployed en route first, followed by RESILIENCE.
Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions at SpaceX, described the Blue Ghost mission as “one step closer to making life multiplanetary.”
What’s in a Name: Firefly’s Blue Ghost on Ghost Riders in the Sky mission
The Firefly Aerospace lander has been named Blue Ghost, after a rare species of firefly. It matched the company name perfectly. Blue Ghost’s mission is known as Ghost Riders in the Sky. “The name Ghost Riders in the Sky played well with our Blue Ghost theme,” said Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director for Firefly.
Kevin Scholtes, Firefly’s future systems architect, told FLORIDA TODAY that they are trying to build an image of a highway going to the moon with this mission name.
How Firefly’s Blue Ghost came to be
In 2021, Firefly was awarded a mission contract from NASA, which included the Blue Ghost lander that carried 10 payloads to the moon. Firefly was selected based on its payload.
“What NASA does is they contract for the manifest capability in space, as opposed to specifically the lander,” Scholtes told FLORIDA TODAY.
This is all part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, an effort aimed at using landers from private companies to ferry scientific payloads to the moon. The science and technology payload will advance NASA’s understanding of the moon, aid in the design of future spacecraft, and even increase the safety of future astronauts.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9, will deliver ten science and technology payloads to the moon for NASA. Landing is expected to take place in early March 2025.
This is Firefly’s first mission. NASA has specified the landing site as the Mare Crisium crater, where Blue Ghost will land within an ellipse of 100 meters (0.062 miles). It will rely on built-in cameras to take it to a safe location.
“As much as we have studied and looked at the moon, our knowledge of what its surface looks like up close is pretty much limited to orbital images. So we don’t know in advance whether there is a large boulder where we want to land, or a large crater,” says Scholtes.
Allensworth described the lander as “fairly wide and short.” She told FLORIDA TODAY that Firefly has prepared by conducting a lot of drop testing – looking at exactly what the lander can handle in terms of impact and landing on different surfaces.
The Firefly Blue Ghost lander is slightly larger than the average car, with a height of 2.5 meters and a width of 3.5 meters.
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Firefly Blue Ghost journey to the moon
According to Scholtes, once the lander detaches from the Falcon 9 and is turned on, statistics and health data will be sent back to the team on Earth. The payload data is also returned quickly, as the data is collected during the 45-day journey to the moon. Most of that involves a 30-day orbit around Earth before heading to the moon.
So why does it take Blue Ghost 45 days to travel to the moon?
Scholtes told FLORIDA TODAY that there are many ways to get to the moon, and the question came down to what was most efficient for the mission. “A lot of it is a question of what makes the most sense for mass efficiency, for saving propellant, (and) some of it is a simple question of what makes the most sense for planning,” Scholtes said.
“We opted for a solution that allows us to integrate many possibilities for observation of payloads during transport between Earth and the moon. It also saves us a lot of propellant – in that we have an initial period of orbiting the Earth, and part of that period the moon is actually pulling on the orbit each time we go around the Earth, making it a little bit bigger is becoming. every time,” says Scholtes.
Blue Ghost NASA loads
One load makes optimal use of this route. The LuGRE (Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment) payload, which will test the possibility of a future lunar navigation system, will collect data during passes over various points on Earth, and then again from the lunar surface. LuGRE will attempt to leverage existing Earth-orbiting Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) from lunar range. This experiment is a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency.
Other experiments will study lunar conditions to provide insight into future spacecraft designs and even the safety of future astronauts, said Nicola Fox, associate administrator in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Also on board is an experiment aimed at shedding lunar dust, which was a challenge during the Apollo moon missions. According to Fox, moon dust can affect instruments and even the health of astronauts.
For example, Kristen John, head of technical integration for the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told FLORIDA TODAY that the Stereo CAMera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) mission from NASA’s Langley Research Center will measure the impact of dust on the spacecraft and also on the impact of the spacecraft on the surface as Blue Ghost lands.
“We have cameras, mainly on the bottom of the lander, that literally measure the interaction between the plumes and the interaction of the engines with the surface as it lands,” John says.
Once Blue Ghost lands on the moon, the payloads will have only 14 days of sunlight to collect data.
The NASA payloads include:
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Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) – NASA Langley Research Center
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Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) – Italian Space Agency (ASI) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) – NASA Kennedy Space Center
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Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) – Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University
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Lunar Magnetotelluric Echosounder (LMS) – Southwest Research Institute
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Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration at Speed (LISTER) – Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
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Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) – Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
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Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) – Aegis Aerospace
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Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR) – University of Maryland
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Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) – Montana State University
The afternoon before the launch, Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim told the media that Firefly is “honored and humbled to play a role in paving the way for a lasting presence on the moon.” The lander is engraved with the names of all the company’s employees and major investors. .
Meanwhile, the lander known as RESILIENCE, which is part of the HAKUTO-R Mission 2 for Japanese aerospace company ispace, will land within 4-5 months. The lander will deploy a microrover named TENACIOUS and collect regolith samples. It is the company’s second attempt after a failed attempt in 2022.
Be sure to follow the FLORIDA TODAY Space Team at FloridaToday.com/Space for the latest news from the Space Coast.
Brooke Edwards is a space reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at bedwards@floridatoday.com or at X: @brookeofstars.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: NASA Science: Firefly Blue Ghost lander launches from Florida to the moon
