NASA and SpaceX are preparing for next Wednesday the takeoff from Florida to the Moon of the Blue Ghost 1 mission, which will carry a dozen lunar analysis tools as part of its Artemis program to establish a permanent human presence on the satellite at the end of the decade.
The lander mission from Firefly Aerospace, a private American aerospace company based in Texas, is scheduled to launch on Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:11 local time (6:11 GMT).
After launch, the lander will spend approximately 45 days in transit to the Moon before landing on the lunar surface in early March, Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly, explained at a press conference on Monday.
The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Cargo Services (CLPS) program, which seeks to partner with private companies to facilitate the delivery of scientific and technological tools to the Moon, in support of the Artemis program.
These payloads include instruments designed to study the properties of lunar regolith, geophysical characteristics, and the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere.
The data collected will provide essential information for future manned and unmanned missions, improving understanding of the lunar environment and facilitating the development of technologies necessary for space exploration.
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Scientific investigations on this flight aim to test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, global navigation satellite system capabilities, radiation-tolerant computing, and mitigation methods. of lunar dust.
The data captured could benefit humans on Earth by providing information about how space weather and other cosmic forces affect Earth.
The instruments
Among the instruments are the Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC), which will evaluate how lunar dust adheres to different materials, crucial information for the design of future equipment and space suits.
Also on board will be the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI), which will capture images of the interaction between Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind, providing valuable data on space weather, and the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS), which will characterize structure and composition of the lunar mantle through the study of electric and magnetic fields, helping to understand the thermal evolution of the Moon.
Other instruments are the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER), responsible for measuring the flow of heat from the interior of the Moon, providing information about its thermal structure.
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Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which will demonstrate the ability to use signals from satellite navigation systems, such as GPS and Galileo, on the Moon, which could improve lunar navigation on future missions.
The mission will last approximately 60 days, including the transit to the Moon and operations on the lunar surface.
With information from EFE
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