Firefly Aerospace said it received an additional $10 million from NASA after delivering extra scientific data and imagery collected during its Blue Ghost Mission 1 to the Moon earlier this year.<\/p>\n
The mission, which spanned 45 days en route to the lunar surface and two weeks of operations on it, yielded nearly 120 gigabytes of information, according to the company.<\/p>\n
The newly purchased data includes the first high-definition images of a solar eclipse and a sunset taken from the Moon, along with communications performance, propulsion metrics during descent and scientific payload readings that extended beyond the original scope.<\/p>\n
The spacecraft also recorded wide-ranging temperature fluctuations, from 230 degrees Fahrenheit during peak lunar daytime to minus 275 degrees Fahrenheit during eclipse totality. Firefly said the lander withstood such extremes partly through \u201cOperation Parasol,\u201d a maneuver in which its antenna provided shade against heat.<\/p>\n
The company noted that the data will aid research into the effects of reflected sunlight and lunar dust on spacecraft performance, both critical for long-term surface operations.<\/p>\n
Firefly is part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. In a separate award, the company secured a $176.7 million contract for a 2029 mission to the lunar south pole, which will also deploy a spacecraft into lunar orbit to enhance communications. Its next mission, Blue Ghost Mission 2, is scheduled to land on the far side of the Moon no earlier than next year.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Firefly Aerospace said it received an additional $10 million from NASA after delivering extra scientific data and imagery collected during its Blue Ghost Mission 1 to the Moon earlier this year. The mission, which spanned 45 days en route to the lunar surface and two weeks of operations on it, yielded nearly 120 gigabytes of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[443,137,625,190],"class_list":["post-20296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-firefly-aerospace","tag-lunar","tag-moon","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}