Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company, has been awarded a $179.6 million contract by NASA to deliver six scientific instruments to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program. The contract, the fourth for Firefly under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will see the company's Elytra Dark transfer vehicle deploy its Blue Ghost lunar lander into orbit around the moon. Scheduled for 2028, the mission aims to land the Blue Ghost in the Gruithuisen Domes, silica-rich volcanic features on the near side of the moon. The lander will deploy a rover and operate for over 14 days, carrying out various scientific projects.
gave Texas-based Firefly Aerospace a Christmas present of sorts — a $179.6 million deal to deliver six scientific instruments to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program, which is intended to put astronauts back on the moon. Awarded a week before the holiday, the contract is the fourth for the Cedar Park company under the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. The $2.
San Antonio-built satellite headed to space aboard Texas-built rocket Scheduled for 2028, Firefly’s new contract calls for the company’s Elytra Dark transfer vehicle to deploy one of its Blue Ghost lunar landers into orbit around the moon. The transfer vehicle will stay on orbit to provide communications while Blue Ghost attempts to land in the Gruithuisen Domes, silica-rich volcanic features on the near side of the moon.
instruments — including one built at San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute — will attempt to land near the Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a 300-mile-wide basin on the northeast quadrant of the moon’s near side. SwRI’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder is a $4.8 million device that consists of a control box, four electrodes attached to wires and a telescoping boom with a magnetometer.
mission The electrodes, each a few inches long, are housed in softball-sized launchers the engineers call “yarn balls” attached to each side of the lander. Once Blue Ghost is on the moon, the electrodes are to shoot out from their launchers and settle on the lunar surface to measure currents and collect data. In May, David Stillman, a project scientist working in SwRI’s office in Boulder, Colo.
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