Firefly Aerospace, Inc., headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas, has announced it reached a major milestone with the successful completion of the Critical Design Review of their Blue Ghost lunar lander, paving the way for construction of the lander, scheduled to touch down in the Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises) lunar basin in September of 2023.
Blue Ghost is slated to carry ten NASA payloads as part of the $93.3-million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract secured by Firefly earlier this year.
Yearly outings
The robotic lunar lander will also take several commercial payloads to the Moon’s surface. The lander is the first of what is expected to be yearly lunar surface jaunts for Firefly.
Blue Ghost will operate a variety of payloads through lunar transit and orbit, as well as from the lunar surface. These payloads will explore the region’s regolith properties, geophysical characteristics, and interaction of the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.
There are also several key technology demonstrations related to navigation and sample collection.
The lander is to be equipped with a camera that will provide never before seen views relayed from the Moon back to Earth, including video.
Lunar economy
In a Firefly press statement, Tom Markusic, Firefly’s CEO, said: “This mission is a forerunner of what we see as a growing cadence of recurring data and payload service missions in cis-lunar space that will kick-start a lunar economy.”
Blue Ghost’s targeting of Mare Crisium has been the area of exploration of previous lunar missions including the former Soviet Union’s Moon landers, Luna 15 (failure), Luna 23, and Luna 24.
In 2012, the NASA Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) project — a dual-spacecraft mission that involved placing two identical spacecraft in orbit around the Moon — used high-quality gravitational field mapping to determine its internal structure. The GRAIL mission confirmed and mapped a mass-concentration at the center of the Crisium basin.
For more information on Firefly, go to: https://firefly.com/