With Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) as a key supplier, providing spacecraft tracking and communications services throughout the mission, Firefly Aerospace’ Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander successfully landed on the Moon on March 2 at 9.34 CET, and conducted surface operations. This is an incredible milestone for lunar space travel and research.
Carrying 10 NASA science and technology instruments to the lunar surface, the Blue Ghost lunar lander was launched on Wednesday, January 15, onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On its approximately 45-day transit to the Moon, Blue Ghost has shared some amazing imagery and live updates, downlinked via SSC’s terrestrial ground stations. Once the Firefly team successfully landed on the Moon, the immediately started surface operations and used the SSC system to downlink data.
“SSC is proud to be the sole ground station communications provider to Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander. We join the world in marveling at the pictures and videos being delivered to Earth from the BGM1 lunar lander through our network and are humbled to support Firefly in their historic mission. Being the first fully successful commercial landing on the Moon is an historic achievement, and delivering the incredible data from their payload experiments to the scientific community will be an honor for SSC”, says Nick Priborsky, President Connect division, SSC.
We thank Firefly for this great honor and also want to recognize our friends at the John Hopkins University – Applied Physics Lab at INTA in Spain for their support, augmenting SSC’s global network.
The payloads on Blue Ghost Mission 1 will help advance lunar research and conduct several first-of-its-kind demonstrations, including testing regolith sample collection, long-distance Global Navigation Satellite System capabilities, radiation-tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation.
For more information on the mission visit Firefly’s website at Blue Ghost Mission 1: Live Updates.