NASA and Firefly Aerospace plan to have a news conference tomorrow at 2pm to discuss the end of the Blue Ghost mission on the Moon. The lunar lander set down on March 2. It began its mission immediately, knowing the disappearance of the Sun on March 16 would mark the end its work.
Those speaking at tomorrow’s news conference are:
- Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington;
- Jason Kim, CEO, Firefly Aerospace;
- Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director, Firefly; and
- Adam Schlesinger, Commercial Lunar Payload Services project manager, NASA Johnson.
In a press release earlier today, Firefly stated:
Firefly Aerospace…today announced it met 100 percent of its mission objectives for Blue Ghost Mission 1 after performing the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2, completing more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight), and operating just over 5 hours into the lunar night with the final data received around 6:15 pm CDT on March 16. This achievement marks the longest commercial operations on the Moon to date.
After a number of issues with the first commercial missions, this is very good news.
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