In the early morning hours of Jan. 15, a Blue Origin Falcon 9 lifted off from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, bearing not one but two expeditions to the moon.

Firefly, an American company that is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, is mounting its first lunar landing attempt. Its lander is called Blue Ghost and the mission is designated Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Blue Ghost will take 45 days to voyage to the moon. The plan is to land in the Mare Crisium, northeast of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed, and spend an entire lunar day of 14 Earth days conducting experiments and taking images.

Blue Ghost’s instruments include:

• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity- Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
• Lunar PlanetVac- Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
• Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector- University of Maryland
• Regolith Adherence Characterization- Aegis Aerospace
• Radiation Tolerant Computer- Montana State University
• Electrodynamic Dust Shield- NASA Kennedy Space Center
• Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager- Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder- Southwest Research Institute
• Lunar GNSS........
  

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