Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed on the Moon on March 2, 2025, at 08:34 UTC, marking a significant milestone in commercial space exploration.

Launched on January 15, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center, the Blue Ghost lander embarked on a 45-day journey to the Moon.

The mission, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, aimed to deliver ten scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to the lunar surface, supporting future human exploration under the Artemis program.

The lander touched down in Mare Crisium, a 500 km-wide lunar basin, near the solitary lunar mountain Mons Latreille.

This geologically intriguing area offers valuable scientific opportunities to study the Moon's surface and subsurface properties.

Blue Ghost Mission 1's payloads include instruments designed to:

• Analyze lunar regolith properties.
• Study geophysical characteristics.
• Investigate interactions between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.

Notable instruments aboard the lander are:

• Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC): Determines how lunar soil sticks to various materials.
• Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI): Captures images of Earth's magnetosphere interacting with solar wind.
• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER): Measures heat flow from the Moon's interior by drilling into the regolith.

These experiments aim to enhance our understanding of the lunar environment and inform future missions.

The lander is expected to operate for approximately 14 Earth days-the duration of one lunar day-until lunar nightfall, when its solar-powered batteries will deplete.

Firefly Aerospace's achievement underscores the growing role of private companies in lunar exploration and contributes valuable data to NASA's Artemis program, which seeks to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon.