Blue Ghost Just Successfully Touched Down On The Moon

Early this morning on March 2nd, Firefly Aerospace’s privately built lunar lander successfully touched down on the Moon’s surface. This marks Firefly as the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing.

Already they have shared some images during the final descent and even on the surface. Now they are focused on health checks and preparing for the next 14 days to conduct various science and experiments with the payloads aboard.

Touchdown

Over the last month and a half, Blue Ghost made the journey from Earth, first reaching the Moon and then lowering its orbit. This morning, at T – 01:04:00 before touchdown, the lander completed the Descent Orbit Insertion burn while on the far side of the Moon. This placed the lander on its descent trajectory and following the burn it coasted for around 50 minutes before the next major mission milestone.

During this coast phase, the lander used its vision-based terrain navigation system to determine Blue Ghost’s position. At T – 00:11:00 we then saw the D’souza Guidance milestone which is a 9-minute braking burn with all engines. This specific model is similar to the guidance used during the Apollo Moon missions – to position itself above the target landing site and pitch over from a horizontal to a vertical orientation.

Looking at the provided data on the livestream, you can also see that at this point in the mission the Lander is around 18km high and traveling over 6,000 km/h. Over the next 9 minutes, as all the engines continue to burn, the speed and altitude both drop significantly.

With less than two minutes until touchdown, the main engine shutoff apart of Terminal Guidance. This left just the RCS thrusters to make final adjustments as Blue Ghost approached the surface.

On the livestream right at T – 00:00:00 you could see that three of the four landing legs were confirmed to have made contact with the surface, marking the landing. It wasn’t until around 40 seconds or so after that, however, that mission control confirmed to the teams that they had stuck the landing.

Soon after the company tweeted saying, “We have confirmation Blue Ghost stuck the landing! Firefly just became the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing. This small step on the Moon represents a giant leap in commercial exploration. Congratulations to the entire Firefly team, our mission partners, and our NASA customers for this incredible feat that paves the way for future missions to the Moon and Mars.”

Fortunately, Firefly then began releasing images taken on the surface. The first image shows the Moon’s surface and a top-down view of the lander’s RCS thrusters (center) with a sun glare on the right side. The next image captured shows the Moon’s surface, Earth on the horizon, and the lander’s top deck with its solar panel, X-band antenna (left), and LEXI payload (right) in the view. The third and final image released so far shows the lander’s shadow, upright and in one piece on the Moon’s surface.

Blue Ghost landed near a volcanic feature within Mare Crisium, a large basin located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side (when observing the Moon from Earth’s northern hemisphere). Formerly an ancient asteroid impact site, Mare Crisium was created by volcanic eruptions that flooded the basin with lava about 3 billion years ago.

Soon after NASA also tweeted, “We’re baaack! Blue Ghost has landed, safely delivering 10 NASA scientific investigations and tech demos that will help us learn more about the lunar environment and support future astronauts on the Moon and Mars”.

Already teams at Firefly and NASA are working to get the experiments up and running. In an official statement, NASA confirmed that over the next couple hours, Blue Ghost will perform surface commissioning with health checks on each subsystem. Once completed, the lander will be ready to perform its payload operations and science demonstrations. Over the next 24 hours, Blue Ghost will deploy its surface access arm with the Electrodynamic Dust Shield and Lunar PlanetVac, calibrate the top deck gimbal to support the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-Ray Imager and enable operations for other critical payloads.

Following the landing, Firefly and NASA hosted a news conference and provided additional information about the mission and what to expect over the next few weeks. When asked about whether or not there were any anomalies during the landing, Firefly’s CEO said, “The team was clockwork, since launch to acquisition of signal, to trans lunar injection, first burn was close to 0 mm per second precision, no makeup burns required. Then you got a series of 6 more burns, there was a series of orbit injections, never had to do a makeup burn because the team was awesome,” he said.

They later clarified that there were multiple contingencies that they didn’t have to use. No aborted burns, recycles, or going around the Moon a second time.

When asked about accuracy of the landing, the Spacecraft Program Director mentioned, “I do know that we are within our range, that 100m ellipse on the surface. We did do two hazard avoidance maneuvers on the way down, so that tells us that our software worked like it needed to” she said.

As far as the payloads go, a question came up about their future operations and the Program Director was quoted saying, “The team is gonna roll immediately into payload commissioning, so once we confirm that the lander is safely on the lunar surface, there are a couple parallel activities that will take place. First off we are going to deploy our X-band antenna. That’s on a gimble and that gimble actually has two NASA payloads on it, so those will immediately go up.”

“Really, the first three days on the surface are going to be very very busy. Our goal, like I mentioned earlier, is to maximize the amount of time we have on the Moon” she said. The Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA then commented, “We competed this and we gave Firefly the challenge of working on the ops plan to run over the 14 days, these 10 different experiments. So there is going to be science operations every day for the remainder of the mission” he said.

Over the next hours and weeks, we can expect even more images from the company along with status updates and eventually some video.

For context, this was Blue Ghost Mission 1 which is a part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Upon launching on January 15, Blue Ghost spent approximately 45 days traveling to the Moon, allowing ample time to conduct health checks on each subsystem and begin payload science. It’s only intended to operate payloads for a complete lunar day (which is about 14 Earth days). On March 14, Firefly expects to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse when the Earth blocks the sun above the Moon’s horizon. Blue Ghost will then capture the lunar sunset on March 16, providing data on how lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow first documented by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17. Following sunset, Blue Ghost will operate several hours into the lunar night.

In terms of the payloads on Blue Ghost Mission 1, they are meant to help advance lunar research and conduct several first-of-its-kind demonstrations, including testing regolith sample collection, Global Navigation Satellite System abilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation. They believe these investigations will help pave the way for humanity’s return to the Moon. The data captured will also benefit humans on Earth by providing insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces impact Earth, among other valuable research.

Interestingly, Firefly already has a second lunar mission scheduled for next year. Firefly was awarded two additional NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services task orders to provide payload services in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface in 2026, utilizing a two-stage spacecraft configuration with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander stacked on an Elytra Dark orbital vehicle. Elytra vehicle will first deploy Blue Ghost and the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite in lunar orbit. Blue Ghost will then touch down on the far side of the Moon and operate government and commercial payloads for more than 10 days on the surface. Elytra will remain in lunar orbit to provide long-haul communications and enable radio frequency calibration services for NASA.

On this second mission, following separation from Firefly’s Elytra vehicle in lunar orbit, the Blue Ghost lander will touch down at the furthest lunar landing site ever achieved on the far side of the Moon. This uniquely “quiet” region is shielded from Earth-born radio frequency noise. The Moon further shields noise from the Sun during the lunar night, making the region perfectly suited to collect valuable data. There’s even a third mission set to happen in 2028, meaning we can expect to keep seeing Firefly lunar missions as time goes on. On that mission, investigations include mapping the geologic features of the domes, searching for potential water and hydrogen molecules, demonstrating sample acquisition technologies, and characterizing planetary, solar, and galactic radio emissions on the lunar surface. Something to look forward to in the future.

Conclusion

After around 45 days in space, Blue Ghost just successfully touched down on the Moon’s surface. With this mission milestone now complete, teams are expected to be very busy over the next 14 days as they conduct different science with the 10 main experiments on board the spacecraft. Even more info and images should also be released in the coming days.