Two separate lunar landers built by commercial companies are now on the way to the Moon after a SpaceX<\/b> launch early Wednesday morning. <\/p>\n
SpaceX launched the Firefly Aerospace<\/b> Blue Ghost Mission 1 along with ispace<\/b>\u2019s Resilience lunar lander on a Falcon 9 mission. The mission launched from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET. <\/p>\n
The Blue Ghost mission is Firefly Aerospace\u2019s first Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) flight for NASA<\/b> and it is carrying 10 science and technology instruments. Firefly confirmed that it acquired a signal from the lander and completed on-orbit commissioning by 5:30 a.m. <\/p>\n
Blue Ghost is now on a 45-day mission to the moon, where it will spend an additional 14 days operating on the lunar surface. It is headed to the Mare Crisium, a basin on the Moon\u2019s near side. During its time on the Moon, it will support the NASA science and technology demonstrations including lunar subsurface drilling, sample collection, X-ray imaging, and dust mitigation.<\/p>\n
NASA has contracted Firefly for three missions to the Moon under four CLPS task orders. The next mission is planned for 2026, and NASA recently awarded another mission for 2028. <\/p>\n
\u201cAfter all the testing conducted and mission simulations completed, we\u2019re now fully focused on execution as we look to complete our on-orbit operations, softly touch down on the lunar surface, and pave the way for humanity\u2019s return to the Moon,\u201d Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in a release. <\/p>\n
Japanese company ispace also confirmed post-launch that its team has made contact with the Resilience lander, establishing stable communications and attitude control. <\/p>\n
The lander has six payloads onboard developed by different companies and universities, This includes a micro rover called Tenacious, designed by ispace Europe, which will collect lunar regolith. <\/p>\n
This is ispace\u2019s second attempt to land on the moon after its previous Hakuto-R Mission 1 launched in December 2022 was not successful. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two separate lunar landers built by commercial companies are now on the way to the Moon after a SpaceX launch early Wednesday morning. SpaceX launched the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 1 along with ispace\u2019s Resilience lunar lander on a Falcon 9 mission. The mission launched from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49840,"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":[],"class_list":["post-49839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49839"}],"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=49839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}