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SpaceX and NASA are currently aiming for mid-January to launch the private lunar lander named “Blue Ghost.”
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar vehicle is now set to lift off towards the moon at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT) on Wednesday, Jan. 15, departing from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center located in Florida. This mission, referred to as “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” will see Blue Ghost ascend into space utilizing SpaceX’s reliable Falcon 9 rocket.
Details regarding the livestream have yet to be disclosed, but we will keep track of how to view it as NASA and SpaceX release additional information.
Joining the journey will be the Resilience lunar lander designed by the Japanese company ispace. This firm had previously attempted to land on the moon with its Hakuto-R lander, which ultimately met with failure when it crashed on the lunar terrain in April 2023.
Following its launch, Blue Ghost is scheduled to orbit Earth for 25 days before conducting an engine burn that will set it on course for travel to the moon. Upon arrival, it will spend 16 days in lunar orbit while preparing for an autonomous descent to the surface. The targeted landing site is Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”), an expansive basalt plain measuring approximately 460 miles wide (740 kilometers), formed by a historic asteroid impact.
Provided everything operates according to plan, within 30 minutes of landing, the lander will commence transmitting its debut high-definition images from the lunar landscape. Blue Ghost will only have a 14-day window on the moon before the onset of lunar night, which will diminish the lander’s solar power supply — however, its batteries should provide roughly five hours of power to capture images during lunar twilight.
Blue Ghost will transport 10 NASA-led scientific experiments and technological demonstrations to the lunar surface as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, also known as CLPS.
Included among these experiments is one named the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, or LEXI, which will monitor Earth’s magnetic field as it is impacted by energetic particles propelled by solar wind from the sun. This experiment could enable scientists to observe processes within the magnetosphere that have previously remained unseen.
“We anticipate witnessing the magnetosphere inhaling and exhaling, for the first time,” stated NASA’s Hyunju Connor in a statement. “When the solar wind is significantly strong, the magnetosphere will contract and retreat toward Earth, then subsequently expand as the solar wind decreases.”
Blue Ghost will additionally carry the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) device, a dual-camera system designed to observe how the lunar surface responds to disturbances generated by Blue Ghost’s engines during the landing phase.
Additional instruments will gather and analyze samples of lunar dust (or regolith), assess the radiation conditions on the moon’s surface, and even investigate the electrical conductivity within the lunar interior. One specific experiment, known as the Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS), will evaluate a new technique for repelling detrimental lunar dust utilizing an electrical charge.
As is the case with other CLPS missions, Blue Ghost will also carry a prism-shaped laser reflector apparatus that NASA will aim at using laser pulses fired from Earth. This experiment will assist in accurately measuring the distance from Earth to the moon with sub-millimeter precision.
Should it achieve a successful landing, Blue Ghost will be the second mission under CLPS to land on the lunar surface. The first, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 Odysseus mission, successfully landed near the Malapert-A crater on February 22, 2024. Odysseus was the pioneering private spacecraft to touch down on the moon.
A month before Odysseus, the Astrobotic Peregrine lander attempted to reach the moon but was unable to do so due to a faulty valve that resulted in a catastrophic propellant leak. The Peregrine ultimately plummeted back to Earth and disintegrated in the atmosphere.
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