Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Lander closed on Saturday, on the way to an automated nail descent on Touchdown early Sunday, the first of three Robotic Landers in the private sector to achieve his target after starting early this year.
Blue Ghost Lunar Lander spent a month orbiting land after launching At the top of the Falcon 9 rocket in JanuaryGiving a Firefly flight controller Austin in Texas, enough time to activate and test your systems and scientific useful loads before you go to the moon.
Firefly aerospace
Once there, the spacecraft spent 16 days in a lunar orbit, perfecting her trajectory and shone with a spectacular view of Earth with 240,000 miles.
Now, after multiple shootings to reach the planned orbit of descent, the spacecraft 6.6 feet high is ready to fall on the rocket to the surface. Touchdown in Mare Crisium – a sea of crisis – is expected around 3:34 in the morning, near an ancient volcanic feature called Mons Latreille.
The solar manual is expected to act on a full lunar “day” or 14 terrestrial days. If all is well, he can continue to work on the battery for a few hours in a dark lunar night before he finally goes silent.
Firefly CEO Jason Kim said Blue Ghost is the latest example of commercial technology provided by the private sector “truly lowering the costs and accessibility of (space) systems.”
“Once in a blue moon a long time ago, this kind of lunar chanders took billions of dollars and countries behind them (them) to land on the moon,” he said in an interview before starting CBS News.
“This is Firefly Aerospace who will land on the moon on a cost -like contract with a fixed price and do so with the latest commercial technology,” he said. “Just as Simone Biles scored a landing on the Olympic Games, we will do the same for Texas State, for America and the world.”
NASA paid Firefly Aerospace $ 101 million to carry 10 scientific instruments sponsored agencies, built at a price of $ 44 million, on the month as part of the commercial service service initiative (CLPS).
The CLPS program is aimed at stimulating a private industry to start the useful loads of the agency on the moon to collect the necessary scientific and engineering data before the astronaut Artemis start operating on the surface near the southern field of Lunar later this decade.
Firefly aerospace
“One day we will get there in terms of commercial aspects of the moon,” Kim said. “There will be a lot of business plans that will be self -sustaining and growing. It is a great location for the frequent departure and testing of new missions to maintain life in space, which is also a springboard for Mars.”
Divide to universe with Blue Ghost on the same Falcon 9 rocket was another month, Lander, a space aircraft called “Resilience”, which he built in Forenses with headquarters in Tokyo. Last year, the company sent another Lander to the moon, but collapsed to the surface after being left without fuel because of the software leak.
For the second attempt at Fail, the appropriate named resistance has started with a long, low -energy route until the moon and is expected to try landings in May.
Another Lunar Lander, this one who built intuitive machines based in Houston and known as Athena, was launched last Wednesday by the Second Falcon 9 and is expected to touch the month of March 6th.
Athena was also largely funded by the NASA -in CLPS program, which agreed to pay a company $ 62.5 million to carry sophisticated exercises and mass spectrometer per month.
Nasa Nokia awarded a $ 15 million technology contract for mobile communication tests on the month, and another $ 41 million with intuitive Hopper machinery with a rocket drive that will jump into a permanently overshadowed crater in search of ice beds.
Firefly’s Lander wears 10 instruments, including cameras, a drill that will be worn in the surface under the spacecraft, a computer that is a tolerant of radiation, equipment that will try to pull GPS navigation signals from the ground, an experiment to find out more about the lunar dust management and one for tracking the dust that has dropped the rocket.
“One of the fundamental purposes of the CLPS program with NASA is the forerunner of Artemis, which obviously sends people back to the moon,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the Firefly spacecraft program.
“So our useful burden collect data to understand what it feels like to be on the moon surface, work on the moonlight surface? So all this information will be informed when we actually get people back to the moon.”
