Early Wednesday marked the start of a new year of lunar exploration as two robotic landers and a tiny rover set out for the moon.
Two independent, uncrewed missions to the lunar surface were launched by a SpaceX rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET.
One of those projects, created by Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based business, intends to place a lander named Blue Ghost in the Martian Crisium, a 340-mile-wide basin on the moon believed to be the location of an old asteroid impact.
The other project, which is being operated by iSpace, a Japanese business, uses a mini rover named Tenacious and a lander named Resilience. Their intended landing spot is in the far north of the moon, in an area known as Mare Frigoris.
This will be the second time that iSpace has tried to land a spacecraft on the moon. When its Hakuto lander abruptly accelerated during its descent and landed on the lunar surface in 2023, its first attempt was unsuccessful.
Compared to Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which is anticipated to arrive to the moon in 45 days, the ispace lander and rover are anticipated to travel a longer, less energy-intensive route, arriving in four or five months.
Blue Ghost is scheduled to spend roughly two weeks collecting data on the lunar surface while carrying ten NASA science instruments.
Around 2:25 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Firefly Aerospace reported that it had received a signal from the lander orbiting the Earth.
“The expedition will prepare the agency for future human missions to the lunar surface,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote on X, congratulating Firefly Aerospace and SpaceX on the successful launch.
NASA awarded contracts to a number of private businesses to transport technology, science experiments, and other cargo to the lunar surface as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which includes the Blue Ghost mission.
NASA’s larger Artemis mission, which intends to eventually send humans back to the moon, includes such initiatives.
According to Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the Blue Ghost lander’s mission will help guide future Artemis journeys with astronaut crews.
For example, it might provide fresh information about the moon’s topography and landscape, particularly what to anticipate at the lunar south pole, where the crewed Artemis missions will touch down. The lunar terrain composition in the Mare Crisium region, where Blue Ghost is anticipated to land, is believed to be more reflective of the moon overall than most of the landing locations humans visited during NASA’s Apollo mission.
During a news briefing on Tuesday, Fox stated that this is a scientifically strategic and productive site that we focused on because our future astronaut explorers will be able to use human intuition to be able to select up scientifically intriguing items and bring them back to Earth.
A device that will assist scientists in measuring the exact distance between Earth and the moon, another that will investigate the degree to which lunar dust adheres to various materials, and a third that can gather and examine samples of lunar soil using a burst of compressed gas are among the scientific instruments that Blue Ghost is transporting to the moon.
Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, stated in the briefing that every milestone we accomplish will yield important data for next missions and, in the end, put the United States and its international partners at the forefront of space exploration.
How much each firm spent for the joint orbital journey was not disclosed by SpaceX.