Firefly Aerospace's Lunar Lander Ready for January launch.

It was kind of difficult to pick this story for tonight.  You see, the various news sources are all carrying a story that just sorta hits our inner 10-year old's spot for fart jokes.  It's just that after everyone does their Beavis and Butthead "heh, heh" impression, there's not much left. 

So onto a story that has a more coolness factor.  Firefly Aerospace has completed testing of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, in preparation for launch in January, a few weeks away. 

The company announced its Blue Ghost lunar lander completed environmental testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in mid-October and is now ready to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX plan to launch the lander from Launch Complex 39A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day window that opens no earlier than mid-January 2025. The mission is known as "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

Blue Ghost will carry a variety of payloads to the moon, some of which are in support of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS pairs scientific payloads developed by NASA with commercial lunar landers headed for the moon on private missions.

This was thermal/vacuum testing, temperature excursions done in a vacuum chamber. While I don't have a lot of specifics of what was tested and under what conditions, these tests are typically done by setting the satellite on a stand in the vacuum chamber and heating or cooling the hardware to the expected high and low temperature limits.  The performance of the equipment can be measured continuously or only at the desired temperatures, depending on the program requirements. 

Blue Ghost will carry 10 payloads to the moon. One of the more novel and interesting-sounding experiments will be to test a new electrostatic system to repel harmful moon dust. Like some of the other recent lander missions, it will not take a short, direct flight. It will take 45 days to travel to the moon, where it will land in Mare Crisium - the Sea of Crises. Again, like other lunar missions in the last year, Blue Ghost is expected to operate for one lunar day (about 14 Earth days - if they land close to sunrise).  Naturally, I expect there will be efforts to determine if it wakes up the next morning as we saw with JAXA's SLIM lander back last Spring (first story in that roundup).

Blue Ghost will operate for a few hours once night sets in, taking images of the lunar sunset and collecting data on how the surface of the moon behaves during lunar dusk.

Blue Ghost's payloads include a lunar retroreflector that will be used to take precise Earth-moon distance measurements, the Lunar PlanetVac vacuum developed by Honeybee Robotics that will sample moon dust, and the Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), a tiny camera that will capture detailed images of how the lunar surface reacts with the lander's exhaust plumes during landing.

Blue Ghost on the moon. Image credit: Firefly Aerospace

Looks like an interesting couple of weeks if we get to read about what it's doing in real time - or close to real time.

EDIT 11/26 8:00 AM: to correct the title - I used a wrong word and called it a lunar rover instead of lander