Two lunar landers headed for ancient impact sites. What you need to know

The moon is the place to be right now. Commercial spacecraft are about to land on the moon’s surface, unleashing a variety of instruments and tools to explore different regions of the moon to reveal its history and evolution while paving the way for future human missions.

Firefly Aerospace Blue ghost The Lander and SpaceX’s Resilience lander are set to travel to the moon on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, set to launch in a six-day window in mid-January, heralding a new era of lunar exploration as the commercial space industry ramps up its efforts. in the direction of delivering cargo.

Both landers target various lunar sea craters, flat, dark plains formed by ancient impacts on the moon and subsequently filled with lava and other material over the years. Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission is carrying 10 science instruments as NASA- Part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, the event’s landing target is Mare Crisium, an ancient asteroid impact site that was once crowded with basaltic lava The basalts of Mare Crisium are estimated to be 2.5 to 3.3 billion years old NASA.

After landing at Mare Crisium, Blue Ghost will operate for a full lunar day (equivalent to 14 days on Earth), capturing images of the lunar sunset and collecting data on how the lunar regolith reacts to solar exposure during lunar twilight. Based in Texas Firefly. The lander will operate on the Moon during the night for about seven hours.

Blue Ghost’s payloads are designed to test lunar regolith sampling, radiation tolerance, a Moon-based global navigation system and other technologies to inform future missions.

Tokyo-based startup space is gearing up for its own the mission to the moon. The Resilience lander is set to carry a small rover called Tenacious to a region called Mare Frigoris in the far northern reaches of the moon, which is also equipped with scientific instruments, mostly from Japan’s commercial space enterprises, designed to study the lunar surface.

This marks space’s second attempt to land on the moon’s surface, following the less successful first attempt in April 2023 by the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) Lunar Lander fell towards the Moon and hit its surface. The Hakuto-R M1 carried both commercial and government-owned trucks, including a small, two-wheeled transforming robot from the Japanese space agency.

Although the two missions will launch on the same rocket, they will each follow a different path to the Moon. Firefly’s Blue Ghost will remain in Earth orbit for about 25 days before entering lunar orbit, where it will spend 16 days before attempting to touch down on the Moon’s surface. SpaceNews. Elastic, on the other hand, will follow a much longer path to the moon, first operating in an elliptical transfer orbit before moving to a low-energy transfer trajectory via lunar flight, which will then allow it to make a soft landing.The Japanese startup’s first mission to the moon lasted about four and a half months to reach the surface.

It may not be a race to the moon, but the lunar surface is expected to see more visitors to its dusty terrain in the next few years as NASA and other space agencies plan for a permanent human presence on Earth’s satellite.