Private Blue Ghost spacecraft reaches lunar orbit

Arrived: The private Blue Ghost landing vehicle from the US space company Firefly Aerospace has reached the moon. The landing is scheduled to take place in just under two weeks.

"I love you to the moon - but not back," wrote Firefly Aerospace in a post on the social media platform X, alluding to a well-known children's book. "I'm here to stay"

Blue Ghost is currently orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit. It is due to land there on March 2. The descent from orbit should take about an hour. The lander will then land in the Mare Crisium ("Sea of Decisions") in the northern hemisphere of the moon.

The Firefly mission Ghost Riders in the Sky is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program of the US space agency NASA (National Aeronautics And Space Administration). As part of this program, private space companies bring payloads to the moon. CLPS serves to prepare for the upcoming manned Artemis missions to the moon.

Blue Ghost launches with Resilience

Blue Ghost was launched into space on January 15. In addition to the lander from Firefly Aerospace, there was a second one on board SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher: Resilience from the Japanese space company iSpace. However, this is not due to reach the moon for another three months.

Blue Ghost has ten scientific instruments on board. These include the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (Lexi) developed at Boston University, which will take X-ray images of the Earth's magnetosphere in order to study the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field. The Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder will measure electrical conductivity and magnetic fields in order to draw conclusions about the structure and composition of the lunar mantle. The mission on the moon is scheduled to last 14 days.

If the landing is successful, it will be the second successful landing by a private space company, the first having been achieved a year ago by the US company Intuitive Machines. However, the lander tipped over. The first landing attempt by iSpace in April 2023 was a failure: the Hakuto-R lander crashed.

(wpl)