Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is set to make history as it targets a March 2 lunar landing near Mare Crisium, a vast plain on the Moon’s near side. Carrying NASA’s cutting-edge science and technology, this mission marks another crucial step in humanity’s return to the Moon under the Artemis program. As part of NASA’s CLPS initiative, Blue Ghost’s success will pave the way for future lunar and Martian exploration.
Mission Overview: Blue Ghost’s Lunar Delivery.
Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on January 15, Blue Ghost carries 10 NASA payloads designed to investigate the Moon’s environment and test new technologies for future missions. These experiments will provide critical data on lunar surface conditions, radiation levels, thermal properties, and advanced landing systems—all essential for upcoming crewed missions.
Live Landing Coverage & Key Moments.
The landing event, hosted by NASA and Firefly Aerospace, will be streamed live on NASA+ and Firefly’s YouTube channel starting at 2:20 a.m. EST on March 2, roughly 75 minutes before touchdown. The stream will cover the final descent, landing confirmation, and initial mission updates. A post-landing press conference will follow, where experts will discuss the mission’s success and upcoming science operations on the lunar surface.
Why This Mission Matters.
Blue Ghost is a key part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which enables private companies to deliver science and technology to the Moon. These robotic landings will support Artemis astronauts, testing vital systems for future long-term lunar habitation and, ultimately, crewed missions to Mars. NASA’s collaboration with companies like Firefly Aerospace ensures rapid progress in space exploration, resource utilization, and sustainable lunar development.
The Future of Lunar Exploration.
With CLPS contracts valued at $2.6 billion through 2028, NASA is committed to building a strong commercial space ecosystem. The $101.5 million contract awarded to Firefly for this mission underscores the agency’s dedication to fostering innovative, cost-effective lunar transportation solutions. Future missions will refine navigation, in-situ resource utilization, and long-duration surface operations, bringing us closer to a permanent human presence beyond Earth.
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The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—is among the world’s most advanced synchrotron light sources, enabling and supporting science across various disciplines. Advances in automation, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are transforming how research is done at NSLS-II, streamlining workflows, enhancing productivity, and alleviating workloads for both users and staff.
As synchrotron facilities rapidly advance—providing brighter beams, automation, and robotics to accelerate experiments and discovery—the quantity, quality, and speed of data generated during an experiment continues to increase. Visualizing, analyzing, and sorting these large volumes of data can require an impractical, if not impossible, amount of time and attention.
Presenting scientists with real-time analysis is as important as preparing samples for beam time, optimizing the experiment, performing error detection, and remedying anything that may go awry during a measurement.
2024 YR4 is no longer a danger for Earth, and a (small) chance of a lunar impact could provide great science data.
“We are all rooting for the Moon!” Richard Binzel (MIT) is referring to the asteroid 2024 YR4, which for a few weeks had remained at the second-highest-rated probability of potential Earth impact of any asteroid discovered. Now, although its impact probability has fallen to virtually zero for Earth, it still has a slight chance of impacting the Moon on December 22, 2032.
When you look at your surrounding environment, it might seem like you’re living on a flat plane. After all, this is why you can navigate a new city using a map: a flat piece of paper that represents all the places around you.
This is likely why some people in the past believed the Earth to be flat. But most people now know that is far from the truth.
You live on the surface of a giant sphere, like a beach ball the size of the Earth with a few bumps added. The surface of the sphere and the plane are two possible 2D spaces, meaning you can walk in two directions: north and south or east and west.
This second of three videos describes what helps make the Assured Science System limitless, free-ranging, and self-sustaining while also producing the most robust data from every project of every researcher. It is our novel and powerful electronic infrastructure, The Universe of Research Niches (TURN) that is constructed by extracting the Cause & Effect relationships among all technical terms in the universe of existing primary research data. The capacity of TURN to serve as the common resourceful utility for everybody enables us to transform scientific research into a potent revenue-generating system.
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