Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander are set to journey to the Moon aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission is bringing along 10 science instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
It’s also packed with science instruments, mainly from commercial space ventures in Japan, designed to explore the lunar surface.
This marks ispace’s second attempt to land on the lunar surface, following a less-than-successful first try.
In April 2023, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) Lunar Lander plummeted towards the Moon and crashed on its surface.
The Moon is the place to be at the moment. In preparation for their lunar landing, commercial spacecraft are unpacking a variety of instruments and tools to investigate various lunar regions. On their journey to the Moon, two of those robotic explorers are paving the way for upcoming human missions while exploring the moon’s history and evolution in their own ways.
The Blue Ghost lander from Firefly Aerospace and the Resilience lander from ispace will travel to the Moon on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket is scheduled to launch in mid-January over a six-day period. As the commercial space industry intensifies its efforts to regularly deliver payloads to the Moon, the two landers mark the beginning of a new era in lunar exploration.
Different lunar mares—flat, dark plains created by ancient impacts on the Moon and subsequently filled with lava and other material over time—are the targets of the two landers. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program includes ten science instruments on board Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission. Mare Crisium, an old asteroid impact site that was formerly covered in basaltic lava, is the lander’s target. NASA estimates that the basalts in Mare Crisium are between 2.5 and 3.3 billion years old.
According to Texas-based Firefly, Blue Ghost will land in Mare Crisium, operate for a full lunar day (equivalent to 14 days on Earth), take pictures of a lunar sunset, and gather information on how the Moon’s regolith responds to solar influences during lunar dusk. About seven hours into the night, the lander will continue to function on the moon.
To help guide future missions, Blue Ghost’s payloads are intended to test technologies such as radiation tolerance, lunar regolith sampling, a Moon-based global navigation system, and others.
Ispace, a Tokyo-based startup, is getting ready for its own lunar mission. A tiny rover called Tenacious will be transported by the Resilience lander to Mare Frigoris, which is situated in the far northern parts of the Moon. It is also filled with scientific instruments intended for lunar surface exploration, mostly from Japanese commercial space ventures.
After a less than successful first attempt, this is iSpace’s second attempt to land on the moon. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) Lunar Lander fell toward the Moon and struck its surface in April 2023. Along with government-owned and commercial payloads, Hakuto-R M1 was transporting a small, two-wheeled transformable robot from the Japanese space agency.
Even though the two missions will take off from the same rocket, they will travel to the Moon in different ways. According to SpaceNews, Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit before moving into lunar orbit, where it will stay for 16 days before making an attempt to land on the Moon. A lunar flyby will allow Resilience to transition into a low-energy transfer trajectory, which will allow it to attempt a soft landing. In contrast, Resilience will take a considerably longer route to the Moon, initially functioning in an elliptical transfer orbit. The first trip to the Moon by the Japanese startup took about four and a half months.
Within the next few years, as NASA and other space agencies prepare for a sustainable human presence on Earth’s satellite, more visitors are anticipated to drop off payloads across the lunar surface, despite the fact that it may not be a race to reach the moon.
