The moon will be a busy place this year. There are currently three robot -like spacecraft in the space that are aimed at lying on the surface of the moon.
The first of those arriving – the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander, built by Firefly Aerospace from Cedar Park, Texas – will try to land early on Sunday.
When is the landing and how can I view it?
The landing is planned at 3.45 pm Eastern Time on 2. Shirefly. Firefly starts live coverage of the landing at 2:20 hours from the YouTube channel.
What is the destination of Blue Ghost?
This mission is on its way to the Mare Crision, a flat plain formed from lava that is filled and hardened in a 345-Mile wide crater carved through an old asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is located in the northeastern quadrant of the nearby side of the moon.
What is Blue Ghost going to the moon?
The lander is wearing a variety of scientific and experimental loads to the moon surface, including 10 for NASA. These include a drill to measure the heat stream from the inside of the moon to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean up glass and radiator surfaces and an X -ray camera.
That load is part of the commercial Lunar Payload -Service, or CLPs, which aims to put NASA equipment on the Moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built his own Moonlander. The agency will pay Firefly $ 101.5 million if all 10 loads reach the moon surface, and slightly less if the mission does not fully succeed.
Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic van Pittsburgh, failed after the launch. The second, through intuitive machines from Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped.
Why does the landing find itself ahead of such an early hour?
The physics of achieving a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people are awake to look. The spacecraft of the Blue Ghost Lander gets its strength from solar panels, and so the mission wants to land shortly after the start of a new Monday. And to go to the mare on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 am
“That's just when that happens,” said Ray Allesworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.
The mission is to last approximately 14 earth days until the sunset of the moon.
How did the mission go so far?
Blue Ghost has performed almost perfectly. During the first 25 days it circled the earth when the company on the systems of the spacecraft and checked. Then it shot his motorcycle on a four -day trip to the moon and entered a job on 13 February. The cameras of the spacecraft have registered a close-up view on the crater surface of the moon.
A few small malfunctions have come on the road, but no major malfunctions. The mission controllers usually made adjustments when they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.
“Thermal alarms can go off,” said Mrs. Allenworth. “It is a bit hotter than planned, a bit colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see that it is actually okay. “
What happened to the other Maanlander who launched with Blue Ghost?
On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 -rocket that Blue Ghost launched to have a job around the track, Was resilience, a lunar lander built by Isspace from Japan. The two missions are divorced, but ISSPACE, looking for a cheaper ride to the space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, a ride like a secondary load. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.
Although resilience is launched at the same time when Blue Ghost is launched, it takes a longer, more economical route to the moon and is expected to go around the moon at the beginning of May.
