Private U.S. spaceship hours from Moon landing attempt
The Hindu
After a long journey through space, a U.S. company is just hours away from attempting a daring lunar touchdown - its spacecraft poised to become only the second private lander to achieve the feat if it succeeds.
After a long journey through space, a U.S. company is just hours away from attempting a daring lunar touchdown - its spacecraft poised to become only the second private lander to achieve the feat if it succeeds.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting landing no sooner than 3.34 a.m. US Eastern time (0834 GMT) on Sunday, aiming for a site near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the Moon’s northeastern near side.
“Blue Ghost is ready to take the wheel!” the company posted on X on Saturday evening, adding flight controllers had just initiated a key maneuver that lowers a spacecraft’s orbit.
Nicknamed “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the mission comes just over a year after the first-ever commercial lunar landing and is part of a NASA partnership with industry to cut costs and support Artemis, the program aiming to return astronauts to the Moon.
The golden lander, about the size of a hippopotamus, launched on January 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, capturing stunning footage of Earth and the Moon along the way. It shared a ride with a Japanese company’s lander set to attempt a landing in May.
Blue Ghost carries ten instruments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the Moon.
Also read | Private US, Japanese lunar landers launch on single rocket
