March 17 (UPI) — After the first successful commercial moon landing, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost completed its first mission two weeks in.
“After a flawless moon landing, the Firefly team immediately moved into surface operations to ensure all 10 NASA payloads could capture as much science as possible during the lunar day,” Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said Monday in a release.
On March 2, it landed on the lunar surface and began operating.
The Texas company said Monday that Blue Ghost met “100 % of its mission objectives” and has transmitted more than 119 GB of data back to Earth, including 51 GB of data for science and technological purposes.
This was the latest in a series of attempts by commercial companies to land on the moon after decades, but none have succeeded until the Cedar Park, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace recently confirmed its Blue Ghost touchdown marked it as the “first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft-landing on the Moon.”
“We’re incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled from tracking GPS signals on the moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before,” stated CEO Kim.
While it is a commercial mission, the Blue Ghost expedition is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, in which it contracts with third parties to carry scientific hardware and other technology to the moon’s surface.
Blue Ghost carried instruments for 10 NASA-based scientific research projects, and began transmitting images from the lunar surface back to waiting scientists on Earth not long after it landed.
It was one of two lunar landers that launched Jan. 15 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The other, called Resilience, is scheduled to land on the moon in late May or early June.
“This team continues to make near-impossible achievements look easy, but there is no such thing as an easy Moon landing, especially on your first attempt,” according to Will Coogan, Blue Ghost chief engineer at Firefly Aerospace. “We battle tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Texas company says its ramping up for annual moon missions as it looks ahead to begin qualifying and assembling flight hardware for its Blue Ghost Mission 2 to operate in lunar orbit and on the far side of the moon.
On Thursday, Firefly and NASA officials will host a news conference at 1 p.m. CDT at Houston’s Johnson Space Center to discuss mission operations, the science collected and will reveal the lunar sunset imagery and findings.
