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The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface. The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday. The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel. This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon. The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed. Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over. The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset. Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface. A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. The other lunar lander that launched with Blue Ghost was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. Ispace had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch. Resilience is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.
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