The company Firefly Aerospace has received the third contract from NASA for the delivery of supplies to the Moon as part of the CLPS program. According to it, a module with six payloads must make a soft landing on our satellite in 2028.
New order for Firefly Aerospace from NASA
NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace, which was once rescued by Ukrainian businessman Maksym Polyakov, for a third landing module mission to the Moon, including a Mars rover to be launched in 2028.
NASA announced that it is awarding Firefly an order through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program for a mission to the Hriuytkheizen dome region on the visible side of the Moon on December 18. Its cost is estimated at $179.6 million.
A mission using the Firefly Blue Ghost landing module will deliver six payloads to the Moon. These will be instruments for imaging, spectroscopy, and other observations, as well as sampling lunar regolith. Some of the instruments will be mounted on a rover that Firefly is being offered by an unnamed “industrial supplier”.
A key goal of the mission is to help scientists understand the formation of the Hriuytkheizen domes, a region with rocks that are composed of silica-rich magma like granite. On Earth, granite is formed by plate tectonics and in the presence of water, which the Moon lacks, so scientists cannot understand how the Hriuytkheizen domes formed.
The CLPS program
This award is one of CLPS’ largest orders to date, second only to the contract with Astrobotic for the Griffin landing module, which was originally to carry NASA’s VIPER lunar rover. There, the amount was initially estimated at $199.5 million and later grew to more than $300 million.
It was the second of two major CLPS missions for which NASA officials had previously noted that they planned to commission this year, after a long hiatus to incorporate lessons learned from the first CLPS missions, Peregrine from Astrobotic and IM-1 from Intuitive Machines. In August, NASA awarded Intuitive Machines an order for the IM-4 mission, which will travel to the south pole of the Moon in 2027.
At that time, NASA also contracted with Blue Origin to fly a camera on that company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 landing module, which is on a commercial demonstration mission in 2025.
The CLPS task order is the fourth for Firefly. This includes three lunar landing modules, as well as one to provide radio frequency calibration services from orbit to support the science radio payload on the second landing module.
The first mission, Blue Ghost 1 or “Ghost Racers in the Sky,” is scheduled to launch in mid-January with a landing at Mare Crisium on the near side of the Moon about 45 days after launch. Blue Ghost 2 will appear in 2026, landing on the back side of the Moon. The mission will also put ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite into orbit.
Provided by spacenews.com
