Astronomy and Space

Blue Ghost Mission 1

Blue Ghost Mission 1 was a robotic Moon landing mission conducted by Firefly Aerospace (Firefly). The spacecraft soft-landed on the lunar surface on March 2, 2025, making Firefly the first commercial company to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon. As part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, the mission delivered ten scientific and technological experiments to advance future human exploration under the Artemis program. About 5 hours after lunar sunset on March 16, 2025, the solar-powered lander's batteries depleted and communications were lost. The mission's end was officially declared at 23:25 UTC. The Blue Ghost lunar lander was launched from Kennedy Space Center on January 15, 2025, using a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket that also carried the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander. At 08:34 UTC on March 2, 2025, it delivered 10 payloads to the lunar surface within Mare Crisium, a 500-kilometer-wide (310 mi) lunar basin. Its 60-day mission aimed to analyze lunar regolith, study geophysical characteristics, and investigate interactions between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. The lander's scientific payloads included a regolith adherence characterization experiment, a lunar retroreflector for precision distance measurements, a radiation-tolerant computer, thermal exploration probes, and more. All 10 NASA payloads (including GNSS tracking, heliospheric X-ray imaging, magnetotelluric sounder, and a radiation‑tolerant computer) powered on, collected data, and transmitted over 110 GB back to Earth.

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See also

• ▸Cosmic distance ladder
• ▸Demographics of Armenia
• ▸Gamma Geminorum

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