Today, January 15, at 01:11 US East Coast time (09:11 Moscow time) from the launch pad at the Space Center. Kennedy in Florida, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Blue Ghost and Resilience lunar modules launched. The first was built by Firefly Aerospace, and the second is the development of the Japanese company ispace.
Image source: x.com/SpaceX
The first stage of the rocket, as planned, returned to Earth 8.5 minutes after launch, landing on the Just Read the Instructions floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The second stage continued to move: 65 minutes after launch, the Blue Ghost module was delivered to the lunar transfer orbit, and after another 27 minutes, Resilience was deployed.
Blue Ghost’s mission, dubbed Ghost Riders in the Sky, is Firefly’s first lunar mission under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The lander carries ten NASA research and technology vehicles to study the lunar environment. This is already the second mission for ispace: in March 2023, the Hakuto-R lander entered lunar orbit and crashed during landing a month later.
Image source: fireflyspace.com
Blue Ghost will stay in low-Earth orbit for 25 days – during this time all systems will be checked, and operation of some scientific instruments will also begin. It will then embark on a four-day journey to lunar orbit, where it will spend another 16 days before attempting to land in the Sea of Crisis in the northeast of the visible side of the Moon. Once on the lunar surface, the module will be busy with research work for two weeks—one full lunar day. Ten CLPS vehicles are a record for a lunar cargo delivery program; many are designed to study regolith or lunar dust.
Resilience will travel to the Moon via an energy-efficient route and will arrive there later than Blue Ghost. If the mission is successful, the module will land in the Sea of Cold in the northern hemisphere of the Moon in 4.5 months. One of Resilience’s payloads is the Tenacious micro-lunar rover, also designed to study lunar soil.
Image source: ispace-inc.com
The coming year promises to be a busy one for lunar missions. In February 2024, the American company Intuitive Machines successfully landed the Nova-C Odysseus module; perhaps the IM-2 mission will launch in February 2025 – one of its tasks will be the search for lunar ice in the area of the South Pole of the Moon. The IM-3 mission is expected to launch before the end of the year, as well as Griffin Mission One: the American company Astrobotic will try to restore its reputation after the failure with the Peregrine module in January last year.