NASA’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is headed for the moon, flying through space with a small lunar rover called Tenacious.

“After all the test runs and mission simulations, we are now fully focused on execution as we look to complete our on-orbit operations, gently touch down on the lunar surface, and pave the way for the return of mankind to the Moon,” Jason Kim, CEO of Blue Ghost builder Firefly Aerospace, SAYS in a statement.

The mission, named Ghost Riders in the Sky, was launched on Wednesday from the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, at 1:11 am ET. Blue Ghost separated from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 2:17 am ET and established communication with Firefly’s Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, Texas, at 2:26 am ET.

Blue Ghost’s primary mission is research. It will hang The earth’s orbit for 25 days measuring and waiting for the right time to fling oneself to MONTHS. After four days of travel, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descending to Great Crisisone of the largest basins on the moon.

Once there, it will spend one lunar day — about 14 Earth days — measuring with 10 NASA payloads. The instruments will measure subsurface thermal data, radiation levels and other details of the planet. Blue Ghost will also measure regolith, which is the loose dirt and sediment that often forms on airless planets like the moon. Research on regolith will help reduce dust on future lunar missions.

At the end of its mission, Blue Ghost will take some pictures of the lunar sunset as night falls. The lander is not intended to return to Earth, so when night falls, the lander has about five hours to perform its final actions before going offline. Firefly Aerospace says that should be more than enough time to take photos of the sunset and bring them back to Earth. Once offline, that’s the end of the story for Blue Ghost.

The Tenacious rover is small but powerful

With Blue Ghost, NASA launched the Powerful lunar rover from the Japanese company ispace. It’s one of the smallest planetary rovers ever designed, and it wouldn’t look out of place on one RC car toy store. The sturdy measures 10 inches long and weighs 5 pounds.

Resilience is part of Resilience’s second mission. The first happened in 2022 with the equally small Hakuto-R lander.

The stable will land in the Atlas crater of Mare Frigoris and establish a connection with Hakuto-R. That’s how the data gets back to Earth.

Tenacious will use its equipment to conduct food production experiments, detect radiation, conduct water electrolysis and collect regolith.

What are mission payloads?

In total, there are 15 total payloads — the elements of the spacecraft dedicated to generating and relaying mission data — on their way to the moon. Five of them are with Tenacious and 10 with Blue Ghost.

Blue Ghost payloads

• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Fast (LISTER) from Honeybee Robotics
• Lunar PlanetVac (LVP) from Honeybee Robotics
• Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR) from the University of Maryland
• Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) from Aegis Aerospace
• Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) from Montana State University
• Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) from NASA Kennedy Space Center
• Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) from Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Johns Hopkins University
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) from the Southwest Research Institute
• Lunar GNSS Receiver Experimental (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Stereo CAmera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPS) from NASA Langley Research Center

Strength payloads