Aerosopace companies Firefly and ISpace (Japan) launched their lunar probes on a SpaceX rocket, January 15, 2025.
Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon in the Mare Crisium basin, March 2, 2025. Its mission will study the moon in preparation for human exploration in the future.
Japanese country ISpace's Hakuto-R Mission 2 (Resilience) crashed onto the lunar surface on June 5, 2025.
Blue Ghost Mission 1, launched January 15, 2025, landed on the moon this morning. The robotic mission is the first commercial company, FireFly Aerospace, to successfully land on the moon.
The spacecraft landed at Mare Crisium and will study the moon's regolith, the loose, fragmented rock, and soil. The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) will determine how lunar regolith sticks to a range of materials exposed to the moon's environment during landing and lander operations.
The Next Generation Lunar Retroflectors (NGLR) will measure the distance between Earth and the moon precisely, using reflectors on Earth.
The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) will take images of the interaction of Earth's magnetosphere with the flow of charged particles from the sun.
The Reconfigurable, Radiation Tolerant Computer System (RadPC) will demonstrate a radiation-tolerant computing technology.
These are among the instrumentation Blue Ghost will employ while it studies the lunar surface.
