What time will the private Blue Ghost probe land on the moon Sunday? How to watch live.
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The private spaceflight company Firefly Aerospace will attempt its first-ever moon landing in the wee hours of Sunday (March 2) and you'll be able to see it live, but you do need to know when and where to watch. Luckily for you, we've got it covered.
Firefly Aerospace's robotic Blue Ghost lander is scheduled to land on the moon on Sunday no earlier than 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 GMT) when it touches down on the vast Sea of Crises (or Mare Crisium). You'll be able to watch the landing live on this page, courtesy of NASA and Firefly Aerospace, starting about an hour before the landing attempt.
The $93.3 million Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 10 NASA experiments as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program. If all goes well, the probe will spend two weeks studying the lunar surface, but first it has to land safely. Read on for the exact timing of Blue Ghost's moon landing and what it will do on the lunar surface. And check out this awesome Blue Ghost video of the moon during a recent orbit.
Firefly Aerospace is currently targeting a 3:34 a.m. EST landing for the Blue Ghost lander (it will be 2:34 a.m. CST at the company's central Texas headquarters), but the landing sequence itself begins much earlier.
"Our landing event kind of takes place, really, over about an hour," Ray Allensworth, Firefly Aerospace's spacecraft program director, told Space.com's Mike Wall in an interview. "Several hours before the actual event is where we will send the commands to the lander."
Those commands will set the stage for a deorbit and landing process that will take about 63 minutes, starting with a so-called descent orbit insertion burn while the lander is 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface. The lander will then coast down to an altitude of just over 12 miles (20 km), then fire its engines in a "powered descent initialization" (or PDI) burn.
"PDI until landing is fully autonomous, so our onboard software packages will fully take control of the lander," Allensworth said, adding that Blue Ghost's onboard navigation system, cameras and rangefinders will take over to find a safe spot to land.
"So that 12 to 13 minutes is going to be a little bit nail-biting, but it is autonomous," she added.
Yes, you can definitetly watch Blue Ghost attempt to land on the moon in real time, in livestreams from NASA and Firefly Aerospace.
NASA's livestream of the landing will begin about an hour before launch at 2:30 a.m. EST (0730 GMT) and will run through the landing. You can watch live on the NASA+ streaming service and the NASA YouTube channel. It's NASA's livestream that Space.com will carry on this page, as well as on our front page.
Firefly Aerospace, meanwhile, is offering daily Blue Ghost mission updates on its website and has set up its own YouTube feed for landing day. That livestream will begin at 2:20 a.m. EST (0720 GMT).
No matter which YouTube feed you watch, the Blue Ghost landing attempt could be a nail-biting experience, given it's the first of its kind for Firefly Aerospace. Still, the spacecraft has performed smoothly on its 45-day trip to the moon.
"I think with each burn that we've done, we've started kind of gaining confidence, especially because some of our burns have had such extreme precision," Allensworth. "We're like, 'Oh, okay, we did do good. Like, we are prepared. It is going well."
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander will touch down in a vast impact basin on the moon's near side, the side that faces Earth, called Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises).
Mare Crisium is a basalt plain that covers about 68,000 square miles (176,000 square kilometers) of the moon, making it about the size of the U.S. state of Missouri, according to NASA.
"It is the scar left behind when a massive asteroid impacted the lunar surface several billion years ago, and the crater flooded with dark, igneous lava," NASA wrote in an overview. Blue Ghost is targeting a spot on a low volcanic dome called Mons Latreille inside the basin. Scientists suspect the region is unique from the Apollo landing sites visited by astronauts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and could yield new discoveries about the moon's composition.
Allensworth said that Blue Ghost will target a zone about 328 feet (100 meters) long, "where NASA's like, 'We're cool if you land anywhere in here.'"
There are 10 NASA payloads riding on Blue Ghost, all of them fixed to the spacecraft, which stands 6.6 feet (2 meters) tall and is 11.5 feet (3.5 m) wide. The payloads weigh about 330 pounds (150 kilograms) altogether. Here's a a short look at what they are, but for a deeper dive, check out our story about what's onboard Blue Ghost.
Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector: A device that will serve as a reflective target for pulses shot from Earth-based Lunar Laser Ranging Observatories to measure the distance between Earth and the moon within the sub-millimeter range.
Regolith Adherence Characterization: An experiment containing 30 different types of material surfaces to be exposed to the moon's environment after landing to determine how they're affected by the lunar environment and dust.
Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager: A experiment that will monitor the interaction of solar wind with Earth's magnetosphere, and how energy in that environment generates geomagnetic storms.
Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity: A small drill expected to cut up to 9 feet (3 meters) below the lunar surface to measure the moon's heat flow at different depths.
Electrodynamic Dust Shield: A tech demonstration payload to test how electric fields can manipulate lunar dust on the moon's surface.
Radiation Tolerant Computer System: Another tech demonstration to test a potential method to protect computers from the harsh radiation environment in space and on the moon.
Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder: This instrument is an weird one. It will help scientists calculate the electrical conductiveness of the moon by monitoring interactions between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.
Lunar PlanetVac: It is what it sounds like — a vacuum-like device to collect lunar dust samples with a pneumatic system powered by compressed gas.
Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies: This is a camera on Blue Ghost that will record images of the moon during the lander's descent and study how the probe's thruster plume kicks up dust during touchdown.
Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment: This is a navigation system experiment that will attempt to use Earth's own guidance and navigation satellite system (GNSS) for spacecraft tracking around the moon.
Blue Ghost is not designed to last forever on the moon.
It will take 45 days for the lander to reach the lunar surface, but the probe is only designed to last one lunar day, the equivalent of about 14 Earth days. That allows the NASA payloads on the solar-powered Blue Ghost to make their science observations during the lunar daytime, before the long night covers the region in darkness and chill.
But it should be an eventful two weeks, which will end just after a total lunar eclipse on March 14 turns the moon blood red to observers on Earth. It will look quite different to Blue Ghost.
"On March 14, Firefly expects to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse when the Earth blocks the sun above the moon's horizon," Firefly Aerospace wrote in an overview. "Blue Ghost will then capture the lunar sunset on March 16, providing data on how lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow first documented by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17."
The moon lander should last only a few hours into the lunar night before shutting down, Firefly Aerospace said.
Firefly Aerospace is hoping for the best with Blue Ghost's planned moon landing, but if the company isn't able to touch down on time at Mare Crisium, it may have another chance.
While the target time for the Blue Ghost moon landing is 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 GMT), it is possible that something may come up before the lander leaves orbit that could cause a delay. If that happens, flight controllers could delay the landing and fly around the moon a couple of more times.
If either of the two final descent and landing burns "isn't perfectly executed on the first try, we will have a chance to go around the moon again on both of those burns, to do another orbit and try again," Allensworth said. "Which could delay our landing time by one to two hours."
That decision will likely be made in real time as Blue Ghost orbits the moon at an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km). It should take the lander about 63 minutes to reach the lunar surface once it begins its descent.
Editor's note: Visit Space.com for the latest news on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission and tune in on March 2 for our landing livestream and coverage. Space.com Spaceflight Editor Mike Wall contributed to this report.
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