The journey of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander came to an end over the weekend. The 14-day operation on the surface of the Moon was officially declared over on Sunday, March 16, when the robotic lander sent its final transmissions back to Earth.
Firefly Aerospace said that its 346-hour-long mission was the longest lunar surface operation for a commercial company to date. It began with touchdown at Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille on March 2 at 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 UTC).
“The last 24 hours I think have been really, really special. I don’t think I’ve really processed that the mission is concluded and that we’ve taken our last data down,” Ray Allensworth, Spacecraft Program Director for Firefly Aerospace, told Spaceflight Now on Monday. “That last communication happened around 6:15 p.m. [CDT] last night and then I walked in this morning, I think now it’s a habit, I walk in and I go straight to the MOC [Mission Operations Center] and it was kind of this weird feeling because I went to the MOC and the MOC was completely empty.”
Since launch day on Jan. 15, the MOC has been continuously staffed by Allensworth and her colleagues at Firefly Aerospace to ensure the mission was as successful as possible. She said while the mission was largely successful, there were some notable things they learned and will incorporate into future missions.
One of the more notable surprises came in how the thermal conditions on the Moon compared and contrasted with the modeling they did before the mission.
“We knew generally what the temperature ranges would be and we knew what to expect through lunar noon, but what we didn’t expect is how the Sun interacting with the surface would then, in turn, impact the lander,” Allensworth said.
She said an analogy that matches up with what happened is a snow boarder who didn’t account for the reflection of the Sun off the snow and forgot to put sunscreen on the bottom of their chin. In a similar vein, the Sun reflected off of a crater and warmed up parts of the lander that otherwise were not in direct sunlight and were not predicted to get hot.
“We’ll definitely use this moving forward on Mission 2 and Mission 3. This is actually data that NASA really wanted to collect because it will inform all future missions to the Moon,” Allensworth said. “It’ll really greatly help all the other Artemis programs or other CLPS missions.
“Basically, anyone who wants to go to the lunar surface, this type of thermal data will have a direct kind of relationship to how exactly we deal with it.”
Blue Ghost Mission 1 was the third mission to launch as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. It was designed to help the space agency get science and technology demonstrations to the Moon for a fraction of the cost had NASA done a solo venture.
CLPS was also designed to help spur the cislunar economy by investing in commercial companies to build a variety of landers that could in turn inspire other businesses to think about how they could also utilize the Moon. The safe touchdown and operations on the lunar surface fulfilled NASA’s $101 million contract with Firefly Aerospace.
NASA paid an additional $44 million to cover the cost of the 10 science payloads that were integrated onto the lander.
“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,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, in a statement. “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.”
Allensworth said now that the lander is done transmitting data, teams will conduct a full mission retrospective, which will begin in two to three weeks. In the immediate future, they’re busy making sure that all the researchers behind the science instruments have received all of their data before the team take some personal time off to refresh prior to getting into the review.
“It will largely cover operations forward. We have been trying to be very conscious about incorporating lessons learned from each phase of the mission as we go through them,” Allensworth said. “Example: after we built the lander, we paused and that was also the moment when we won Mission 2 and we said, ‘Ok, what did we learn from this first year of design and initial build that we want to make sure and capture for Mission 2?’”
She said it’s important that they also document risks that may have been mitigated on Mission 1, but could still exist on Mission 2, and nip them in the bud before getting too far down the road.
Mission 2 and Mission 3 on deck
Mission 2 is a more ambitious flight to the far side of the Moon and will incorporate both a Blue Ghost lunar lander as well as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Lunar pathfinder spacecraft and a second spacecraft from Firefly Aerospace called the Elytra Dark, which is also an orbital vehicle.
The mission is designed to launch in 2026 and as the build begins, Allensworth said they decided to start with Elytra Dark.
“We’ve built smaller versions of Elytra, but this is the first bi-prop Elytra Dark that we’re building as a company,” Allensworth said. “So that is the first one that will go through true spacecraft interaction activity and that’s largely because there’s more unknown unknowns on that vehicle. And we want to make sure we give ourselves plenty of time to get through that integration phase.
“And then, very shortly, after maybe a month and a half or so after the Elytra Dark begins integration, we’ll start seeing those Blue Ghost lander components come into the clean room.”
Elytra Dark is designed to “provide long-haul communications and calibration services for Blue Ghost and the surface payloads,” according to Firefly Aerospace.
Once Mission 2’s 10-day operation concludes, the lander will be commanded to power off instead of seeing how long into the lunar night it can survive. Allensworth said they will hit what they like to call the “kill switch.”
“Mission 2 lander is absolutely required to power off at the end of that lunar day and that’s by design because the NASA payload onboard, [Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment at Night], they require a radio silent environment and that includes the lander,” she said. “So really, past that point forward, LuSEE-Night will just be using the lander as basically a pedestal and they will be operating on the top deck of the lander for a significant period after the lander dies.”
LuSEE-Night is a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy and will be billed as “the first operational radio telescope on the Moon.”
Mission 3 will be a return to the near side of the Moon near an ancient lava flow closed to Sinus Viscositatis, a part of the Gruithuisen Domes. It’s designed to launch in 2028.
Allensworth said the mission for Firefly Aerospace is to continue shrinking the timeline between missions until they’re able to achieve a roughly annual rate of launches and landings on the Moon.
“We want to launch annually to take different payloads, whether it be NASA, government, commercial, international, you know, whoever needs and wants to go to the Moon on these lunar missions,” Allensworth said. Whether it’s to orbit or the surface, we want to be able to provide you a very consistent and reliable trip and that you can come to us and you can know that, within our time constraints, we will be able to get you to where you want to go.”
source: spaceflightnow.com