Not one, but two lunar missions at the same time. At 7:11 a.m. yesterday (Spanish time), a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher successfully took off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. platform from which the Apollo private space companies, one North American and one Japanese, which will land on our satellite separately, in 45 days for the first and about four months for the second.
This is ‘Blue Ghost’, which is the first lunar landing attempt by the American company Firefly Aerospace, and the second Hakuto-R lunar landing module (after the failure of the first in 2023), by the Japanese ispace, called ‘Resilience’. .
After just over an hour of flight, Blue Ghost separated from the Falcon’s upper stage, which placed it into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Half an hour later, Resilience also did the same. From there, the trajectories (and destinations) of the two landers were separated forever.
Two different trips
Blue Ghost will orbit the Earth for 25 days, after which it will fire its engines and begin a four-day journey to the Moon, which it will orbit for a further 16 days. It will then descend and land autonomously on a plain called Mare Crisium, just north of the Sea of Tranquility (where Apollo 11 landed in 1969), to unload various scientific materials.
Resilience, for its part, will take a longer and more tortuous route, on a journey that will pass through the Moon in a month, enter deep space and finally return to our satellite, to land on it between four and five months later. having left Earth. A longer and slower route, but one that saves fuel by following a low energy path. The moon landing is planned on a plain called Mare Frigoris.
If the missions are successful, they will become the second and third private spacecraft to land on the Moon. The first was the Odysseus lander from Intuitive Machines, which achieved it last year.
Scientific missions
Blue ghost, which owes its name to a rare species of firefly from the southeastern United States and weighs 150 kg, is the first mission of the Texas-based company Firefly within the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. from NASA, with which the space agency contracts private transportation services capable of sending small landers, exploration vehicles and scientific instruments to the Moon.
Specifically, the North American spacecraft will carry 10 payloads, both private and public, including a radiation-resistant computer, a drill capable of measuring how heat flows through the moon’s surface and a satellite receiver that will attempt to establish a permanent link with Earth’s GPS network.
Resilience, for its part, is the second attempt by the Japanese company ispace to land on the Moon after the failure in 2023 of its Hakuto-R spacecraft, which means ‘white rabbit’ and which crashed into the surface of the satellite. The Japanese company says it has since updated Resilience’s hardware and software to avoid the errors that caused that failure. In total, it will carry six payloads to the lunar surface, including an experiment to produce food on the Moon using microalgae and a ‘mini rover’ that will tour, analyze and photograph the landing zone.
Blue Ghost and Resilience are the first of about a dozen Moon-bound spacecraft powered by NASA’s CLPS program, many of which are specially designed to test the technology needed for a future permanent human presence. One more step, therefore, in the conquest of what is already considered ‘the eighth continent’ of the Earth.
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