March 2, 2025

— Like a lightning bug blinking as it made its way down into a marsh, the Blue Ghost fired its thrusters as it descended into the "Sea of Crises."

Moments later, Firefly Aerospace's first lunar lander successfully touched down on the moon.

"We stuck the landing. We're on the moon!" said Jesus Charles, Firefly's mission flight director.

The feat, at 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 GMT) on Sunday (March 2), marked just the second time in history that a privately-built and operated spacecraft safely reached the lunar surface. In addition, with 10 science instruments ready to begin two weeks of data collection, it was also the second delivery achieved under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Flight controllers at Firefly Aerospace's headquarters in Austin, Texas, monitored the approach, which began 47 days after the lander left Earth on Jan. 15 and an hour before the touchdown. At that point, while still about 62 miles (100 km) above the moon, "Blue Ghost" (named such after a type of firefly) burned its main engine for one minute to enter its descent trajectory.

Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar landing. Click to enlarge video in new pop-up window. (Firefly)

Equipped with navigational cameras to "see" where it was headed, the robotic probe coasted for about 50 minutes as it lowered to 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) over the surface. Blue Ghost was then programmed to use all of its engines — its 12 attitude control system (ACS) thrusters, eight reaction control system (RCS) thrusters and its main engine — to reduce its orbital velocity and position itself above its target landing site.

With just 100 seconds to go, Blue Ghost shut off its main engine, relying only on its RCS thrusters to control its final approach. Dropping from about 32 feet (10 meters) at an expected 2 miles per hour (1 meter per second), the lander's four legs absorbed the impact as sensors on its footpads signaled to cut its thrusters.

Blue Ghost arrived at Mare Crisium, a basin located in the northeast quadrant of the moon's near side (when observing the moon from Earth's northern hemisphere). The "sea" was created by volcanic eruptions that flooded the area with basaltic lava about 3 billion years ago.

Powered by three solar arrays, Blue Ghost is now a platform for a series of studies and several first-of-its-kind demos, including testing regolith sample collection and lunar dust mitigation.

Among the mission's NASA-provided payloads are a pneumatic drill to measure heat flow from the interior of the moon (LISTER); a lunar regolith sample collection demonstrator (Lunar PlanetVac); an experiment to compare the stickiness of lunar soil to different materials; an X-ray imager to study the interaction of solar wind and Earth's magnetic field (LEXI); a receiver to track GPS and Galileo navigation satellites throughout a full lunar day on the surface (LuGRE); and a stereo camera that is expected to have captured the impact of the rocket plume on the regolith as Blue Ghost descended.

At the end of one lunar day (about 14 days on Earth), Firefly will conclude its first moon mission (Mission 1 or "Ghost Riders in the Sky") by capturing high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on March 14 and then by observing the lunar sunset two days later to see on how lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow as first witnessed by the "last man on the moon," Gene Cernan, on NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Firefly Aerospace's Mission 1 is the 153rd attempt at a moon flight since 1958, including flybys, orbiters, impactors and landers. Blue Ghost is the 27th lander to safely touch down on the lunar surface.