Blue Ghost Mission 1 (Firefly)

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Blue Ghost Mission 1 (TO 19D) is a lunar lander designed to deliver ten payloads to the lunar surface. It launched on 15 January 2025. The objectives of the mission are to investigate heat flow from the lunar interior, plume-surface interactions, crustal electric and magnetic fields. It will also take X-ray images of the Earth's magnetosphere.

On February 13, Blue Ghost went into orbit around the Moon, and on March 2, at 08:45 UT it landed in Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille, targeted at 18.56 N, 61.81 E.

Since launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 15, Blue Ghost traveled more than 2.8 million miles, downlinked more than 27 GB of data, and supported several science operations. This included signal tracking from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) at a record-breaking distance of 246,000 miles with the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment payload – showing NASA can use the same positioning systems on Earth when at the Moon. Science conducted during the journey also included radiation tolerant computing through the Van Allen Belts with the Radiation-Tolerant Computer System payload and measurements of magnetic field changes in space with the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder payload.

NASA, NASA News

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