WASHINGTON — NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace for a fourth lunar lander mission, this one taking rovers and instruments to the south polar region of the moon.
NASA announced July 29 it selected Firefly for a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) task order worth $176.7 million. The task order covered a mission landing in an unspecified portion of the lunar south pole region in 2029.
Under the task order, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 4 lander will deliver two rovers. MoonRanger, developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University and Astrobotic, will operate autonomously on the lunar surface, collecting images and neutron spectrometer data to study the lunar regolith and any volatiles it may contain. A second rover from the Canadian Space Agency will carry a suite of instruments to study the lunar surface and potential presence of water ice.
The lander itself will carry three instruments. The Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometer from the University of Bern will measure the composition of lunar regolith using material collected by a robotic arm and scoop on the lander. The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) instrument will study the interaction of the lander’s engine plume with the surface. A version of SCALPSS also flew on Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 lander earlier this year. The lander, like other missions under the CLPS program, includes a laser retroreflector array.
“As NASA sends both humans and robots to further explore the moon, CLPS deliveries to the lunar south pole region will provide a better understanding of the exploration environment, accelerating progress toward establishing a long-term human presence on the moon, as well as eventual human missions to Mars,” Adam Schlesinger, manager of the CLPS program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center said in a statement.
This the fourth lander mission awarded to Firefly, which remains the only company that has performed a fully successful lunar landing mission under CLPS to date. The Blue Ghost 1 lander landed in Mare Crisium on the near side of the moon March 2, carrying 10 CLPS payloads. The lander operated through the end of the lunar day there March 16.
The company received two more CLPS awards before the successful Blue Ghost 1 landing. The company won in 2023 CLPS awards for Blue Ghost 2, a lunar lander mission to the far side of the moon that will also deliver ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder mission to orbit around the moon. NASA awarded Firefly another CLPS award last December for Blue Ghost 3, a lander to the Gruithuisen Domes region on the near side of the moon.
“Firefly is honored to support another NASA CLPS task order as a proven, reliable partner for robotic missions to the Moon,” Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said in a company statement. “We’ve set the bar high, and we aim to continue setting new records in our missions to come with our active production line of Blue Ghost landers.”
As with its upcoming Blue Ghost 2 and 3 missions, the lander will be accompanied by an Elytra Dark spacecraft that will go into orbit around the moon and support communications. That orbiter will operate for up to five years after the end of the lander mission, including providing images for the company’s new Ocula commercial imagery service.
Blue Ghost 4 will be the company’s first mission to the lunar south pole region, an area of high science and exploration interest but one that can be difficult for landers because of low sun angles and long shadows. Intuitive Machines has attempted two landings in the south polar region, in 2024 and again March 6, but in both cases the lander tipped over on its side. The company said in May that the second lander mission failed because of problems with its laser altimeter along with lighting conditions.
Intuitive Machines will return to the lunar south polar region in 2027 with the IM-4 mission, after the IM-3 mission next year to the Reiner Gamma region much closer to the lunar equator. Both Astrobotic, with its Griffin-1 lander, and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 will attempt landings in the south polar region as soon as late this year. Draper, using a lander from ispace U.S., has a CLPS task order for a landing on the far side of the moon in 2027.
Despite the checkered history of CLPS missions, which includes Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander that malfunctioned shortly after launch in January 2024 and could not attempt a landing, NASA says the program is working well.
“Each of these companies is learning how to do this,” Mark Clampin, deputy associate administrator for science at NASA, said during a July 25 presentation at a meeting of the Space Studies Board. He noted that NASA considered the two Intuitive Machines landers that fell on their side to be partially successful, not failures, because some payloads were able to return data.
“This, again, I think is a really successful program,” he said, that could be applied elsewhere. “Could we use this kind of concept for smaller missions we’re doing in space science across all of our divisions?” He said that could cover missions up to the Small Explorer, or SMEX, class of astrophysics and heliophysics missions.