SpaceX and NASA are now targeting mid-January for the launch of the private moon lander “Blue Ghost.”
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is now scheduled to launch to the moon at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT) on Wednesday, Jan. 15, taking off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission, known as “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” will see Blue Ghost will ride to space aboard SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
Livestream information has not yet been made available, but we will be tracking how to watch as NASA and SpaceX announce more details.
The lighting for the flight will be the Moon’s Resilience Lander built through the Japanese CORPORATE ISPACE. The corporation in the past attempted a moon touchdown with its Hakuto-R landing, which nevertheless crashed to the lunar surface in April 2023.
After launching, Blue Ghost will spend 25 days orbiting Earth before performing an engine burn to put it on a lunar transit trajectory that will take it to the moon. Once there, it will spend 16 days orbiting the moon while preparing for an autonomous landing on the surface. Its destination is Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”), a large basaltic plain some 460 miles wide (740 kilometers) formed by an ancient asteroid impact.
Within 30 minutes of touching down, if all goes according to plan, the lander should begin transmitting its first high-definition images from the lunar surface. Blue Ghost will only have 14 days on the moon before lunar night falls, depleting the lander of its solar power source — although its batteries should give it about five hours of power to capture lunar dusk.
Blue Ghost will bring 10 scientific experiments led by NASA and generating manifesters to the lunar surface to the agency’s lunar service program, or CLP.
One such experience, known as the heliosphere x, the lunar environment recharges, or Lexi, will practice the earth’s magnetic box because it bombards through debris lives blown from the sun in the experience of the wind sun can only assist scientists to look at the processes occurring in the magnetosphere that they have never noticed before.
“We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and breathing in, for the first time,” said NASA’s Hyunju Connor in a statement. “When the solar wind is very strong, the magnetosphere will shrink and push backward toward Earth, and then expand when the solar wind weakens.”
Blue Ghost will also bring stereo cameras for the Lunar Plume Surface Examination Tool (Scruts), a two-camera formula that will monitor how the lunar surface reacts to the disturbance of blue ghost engine landings.
Other tools will collect and examine samples of moon dust (or regolith), measure radiation surroundings on the lunar surface, and even examine the electrical conductivity of the moon’s interior. An experiment, known as the electrodynamic dust shield (EDS), will verify a new approach to repel destructive lunar dust from an electrical charge.
As with other CLPS deliveries, Blue Ghost will also carry a prism-like laser reflector device that NASA will target with laser pulses shot from Earth. The experiment will help measure the distance from the Earth to the moon with sub-millimeter accuracy.
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If it makes a successful landing, Blue Ghost will be the time when the Clps Project project to succeed on the lunar surface. The first intuitive IM-1 project of the intuitive device landed near the Malapert-A crater on February 22, 2024. Ulises, the first personal spacecraft to land on the moon.
A month prior to Odysseus, the Astrobotic Peregrine lander attempted to reach the moon, but failed to reach its destination after a faulty valve caused a catastrophic propellant leak. Peregrine eventually fell back to Earth and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Brett feels curious about emerging Aerarea technologies, the concepts of launching of choice, the advances of the army area and non -mixed aircraft systems. Brett’s paintings gave Scientific American, The War Zone, Popular Science, History Channel, Science Discovery and more. Brett has diplomas in English at the University of Clemson and the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. During his loose time, Brett likes to practice heaven in the dark sky of the Mountains of the Apalaches.
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