The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.
The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday.
When is the landing and how can I watch it?
The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel.
What is Blue Ghost’s destination?
This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.
What is Blue Ghost taking to the moon?
The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.
That cargo 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 its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit 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 of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over.
Why is the landing occurring at such an early hour?
The physics of getting to a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people will be awake to watch. The Blue Ghost lander spacecraft gets its power from solar panels, and thus the mission is aiming to land soon after the dawn of a new lunar day. And to get to Mare Crisium on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 a.m.
“That’s just when that happens,” said Ray Allensworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.
The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.
How has the mission gone so far?
Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface.
A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. Mostly, the mission controllers made adjustments as they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.
“Thermal alarms might go off,” Ms. Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned, a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see is it actually OK.”
What happened to the other lunar lander that launched with Blue Ghost?
On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.
Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.
