Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander leaves Earth orbit to head for the moon

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander is now headed for the moon after firing its engines to send it out of Earth orbit.

"Blue Ghost successfully performed a Trans Lunar Injection burn to escape Earth's gravitational pull and begin a 4-day transit to the moon's orbit," Firefly stated on social media platform X on Saturday (Feb. 8).

The lander launched on the "Ghost Riders in the Sky" mission on Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with the Japanese space exploration firm ispace's Resilience moon lander. Both spacecraft had since been orbiting Earth, preparing for transit to the moon.

Blue Ghost later performed a trajectory-correction maneuver on Feb. 9 to refine the spacecraft's path and keep it on course for entering lunar orbit.

Blue Ghost will enter a high lunar orbit in the next few days and then begin lowering its orbit to get ready for a landing attempt.

"We'll then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before we begin Blue Ghost's descent. This gives Firefly plenty of time to calibrate our navigation system and continue payload science operations for NASA," Firefly said.

The lander is targeting a landing within Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises"), a large basin on the moon's near side.

Blue Ghost is flying to the moon as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which is pairing commercially developed landers with NASA scientific payloads for studying the moon. The lander's science objectives include subsurface drilling, sample collection and X-ray imaging of Earth's magnetic field and dust mitigation.