Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon Lander on course for descent to Touchdown Sunday

The Blue Ghost Lander of Firefly Aerospace closed on the Moon on Saturday, on course for a nail biting automated descent to TouchDown at the beginning of Sunday, the first of three robot -like Moon Landers in the private sector to achieve his goal after launches earlier this year.

After the launch, the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander spent a month in a job around the earth in a job around the earth On top of a Falcon 9 -rocket in JanuaryGiving Firefly -flight controllers in Austin, Texas, enough time to activate and test his systems and science spayloads before he goes to the moon.

Once there, the spacecraft spent 16 days in Maanbaan to refine its route and to radiate spectacular views of the earth from 240,000 miles away.

Now, after several bow thruster flow to reach the planned descent of the descent, the 6.6-foot high spacecraft is ready for a rocket driven drop to the surface. Touchdown at Mare Crisium – The Sea of ​​Crisis – is expected around 3:34 am, near an old volcanic characteristic called Mons Latreille.

The solar energy-driven lander is expected to work for a full moon “day” or 14 earth days. If everything goes well, it can continue to work in the Dark Lunar Night on battery power for a few hours before he finally stops.

Firefly CEO Jason Kim said that Blue Ghost is the latest example of commercial technology given by the private sector “Really reduce the costs and affordability of (space) systems”.

“Once in a blue moon long ago, these kinds of moonlanders took billions of dollars and countries behind (them) to land on the moon,” he said in a pre-launch interview with CBS News.

“This is Firefly Aerospace who will land on the Moon in the event of fractions of the costs on a fixed price contract, and to do it with the latest commercial technology,” he said. “Just as Simone Biles held the landing at the Olympic Games, we are going to do the same for the state of Texas, for America and for the world.”

NASA paid Firefly Aerospace $ 101 million to wear 10 -sponsored science instruments, built for an amount of $ 44 million, to the Moon as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative of the Agency.

The CLPS program is aimed at encouraging the private industry to launch Burgenspayloads to the Moon to collect the required science and engineering data before Artemis astronauts later start this decade on the surface at the South Pole of Lunar.

“These days we are going to get there in terms of the commercial aspects of the moon,” said Kim. “There will be many business plans that grow self -sufficient and grow. It is a great location to often test new missions to support life in space, and it is also a springboard for Mars.”

Sharing a ride to the space with Blue Ghost on board the same Falcon 9 rocket was another Maanlander, a spacecraft called “Resilience” that was built by ISPACE in Tokyo. The company sent a lander to the moon last year, but it collapsed on the surface after having sustained a fuel due to a software litch.

For the second attempt by ISPACE, the correctly mentioned resilience took a long, low energy route to the moon and is expected to make the landing attempt in May.

Another Moonlander, this intuitive machines established in Houston and known as Athena, was launched last Wednesday By another Falcon 9 and it is expected that the moon will touch on March 6.

Athena was also largely financed by the NASA CLPS program, which agreed to pay the company $ 62.5 million to wear an advanced exercise and mass spectrometer to the moon.

NASA has awarded a “Tipping Point” contract of $ 15 million to Nokia to Nokia to test cellular communication on the Moon and another $ 41 million in intuitive machines for a rocket -driven “Hopper” that jumps in a permanently shaded crater in search of ice.

The Lander of Firefly wears 10 instruments, including cameras, an exercise to get bored in the surface under the spacecraft, a radiation-tolerant computer, equipment that will try to withdraw GPS navigation signals from the earth, an experiment to learn more about managing the lander of the Lander’s substance.

“One of the core objectives of the CLPS program with NASA is to be a precursor of Artemis, which clearly sends people back to the moon,” said Ray Allesworth, program director of Firefly, program director of Firefly.

“So our payloads collect data so that we can find out what it feels like to be on the surface of the moon, to work on the moon’s surface? So all that data will inform when we actually bring people to the moon.”