NASA's lunar lander Blue Ghost is on its way to the moon, climbing through space with a small lunar rover called Tenacious.
“After all the tests conducted and mission simulations completed, we are now fully focused on execution as we aim to complete our on-orbit operations, gently touch down on the lunar surface and pave the way for humanity's return to the moon.” Jason Kim, CEO of Blue Ghost builder Firefly Aerospace, he said in a statement.
The mission, called Ghost Riders in the Sky, began on Wednesday from NASAKennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET. Blue Ghost separated from SpaceX's 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 mission will be exploration. He will make friends Earth's orbit 25 days taking measurements and waiting for the right time to throw on the moon. After four days in transit, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descending to A major crisisone of the largest basins on the moon.
Blue Ghost's mission plan shows orbits around Earth and the Moon before the spacecraft lands on the lunar surface.
Once there, it will spend one lunar day—about 14 Earth days—making measurements with 10 NASA payloads. The instruments will measure subsurface thermal data, radiation levels and other planetary details. Blue Spirit will also measure regolith, which is dirt and sediment that often settles on airless planetary bodies like the Moon. Research on regolith will help mitigate dust on future lunar missions.
At the end of its mission, Blue Ghost will take several pictures of the lunar sunset as night falls. The lander is not intended to return to Earth, so once night falls, the lander will have about five hours to perform its final operations before going offline. Firefly Aerospace says that should be more than enough time to take photos of the sunset and beam them back to Earth. Once it goes offline, that's the end of the Blue Ghost story.
The Tenacious mission plan will have the rover rendezvous with the Hakuto-R lunar lander before carrying out its tasks.
The Tenacious rover is small but mighty
Along with Blue Ghost, NASA launched it A solid lunar rover from the Japanese company “Espace”. It is one of the smallest planetary rovers ever designed and wouldn't look out of place in RC car a toy store. Tenacious stands 10 inches tall and weighs only 5 pounds.
Tenacious is part of the second Resilience mission. The first took place in 2022 with the similarly small Hakuto-R lander.
Tenasius will land on Atlas Crater in Mare Frigoris and establish a connection with Hakuto-R. So the data will be sent back to Earth.
Tenacious will use its equipment to conduct food production experiments, detect radiation, conduct water electrolysis and collect regolith.
What are the mission charges?
In all, there are 15 total payloads — the elements of the spacecraft dedicated to producing and transmitting data for the mission — bound for the moon. Five of them go with Tenacious and 10 with Blue Ghost.
NASA kicks off 2025 with a major mission to the moon.
The Burden of the Blue Ghost
- Lunar Instrumentation for Underground Thermal Exploration at Velocity (LISTER) by Honeybee Robotics
- Lunar PlanetVac (LVP) by Honeybee Robotics
- A next-generation lunar retroreflector (NGLR) from the University of Maryland
- Characterization of adherence to regolith (RAC) by Aegis Aerospace
- Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) from Montana State University
- Electrodynamic dust shield (EDS) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center
- Heliospheric X-ray Imager of the Lunar Environment (LEXI) from Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Johns Hopkins University
- Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) from the Southwest Research Institute
- Experimental Lunar GNSS Receiver (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
- Stereo camera for the study of the lunar surface (SCALPS) from NASA Langley Research Center