WASHINGTON: After a long journey through space, a US company is just hours away from attempting a daring lunar touchdown – its spacecraft poised to become only the second private lander to achieve the feat if it succeeds.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting landing no sooner than 3.34am US Eastern time (4.34, pm Singapore time) on Sunday, aiming for a site near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the Moon’s northeastern near side.
“The lander has really behaved well,” Blue Ghost’s program manager Ray Allensworth said on a live webcast from mission control in Austin, Texas. “We haven’t had any major anomalies, which is fantastic.”
Nicknamed “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the mission comes just over a year after the first-ever commercial lunar landing and is part of a NASA partnership with industry to cut costs and support Artemis, the program aiming to return astronauts to the Moon.
The golden lander, about the size of a hippopotamus, launched on Jan 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, capturing stunning footage of Earth and the Moon along the way. It shared a ride with a Japanese company’s lander set to attempt a landing in May.
Blue Ghost carries 10 instruments, including a lunar soil analyser, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the Moon.
Designed to operate for a full lunar day (14 Earth days), Blue Ghost is expected to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on Mar 14, when Earth blocks the Sun from the Moon’s horizon.
On Mar 16, it will record a lunar sunset, offering insights into how dust levitates above the surface under solar influence – creating the mysterious lunar horizon glow first documented by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.
