CBS NEWS
With the nearly full moon shining overhead, two companies, one American and the other headquartered in Japan, launched privately-developed robotic lunar landers early Wednesday, sharing a sky-lighting ride to space atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The U.S. lander, built by Austin, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and known as “Blue Ghost,” is carrying 10 sophisticated instruments for NASA while the Japanese spacecraft, built by Tokyo-based ispace and known as “Resilience,” is carrying four instruments of its own and a small microrover known as “Tenacious.”
Mounted one atop the other in the nose cone of the Falcon 9, liftoff from historic pad 39A came on time at 1:11 a.m. EST Wednesday. Blue Ghost, weighing 1,033 pounds without propellant, was released to fly on its own one hour and five minutes after liftoff.
Resilience, which weighs about 750 pounds, was deployed 21 minutes later, after the Falcon 9 carried out a final second stage engine firing to put the craft on a different trajectory.
“Our customers have different strategies for arriving to the moon, and Falcon 9’s abilities enable us to deliver each lander to their respective injection orbits to complete their missions,” said Julianna Scheiman, a senior SpaceX manager.
The landers are taking very different routes to the moon. Blue Ghost is expected to spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, giving Firefly engineers time to thoroughly check out the craft’s instruments, propulsion and other subsystems. The craft then will fire its engines for a four-day trip to the moon, followed by 16 days in lunar orbit.
If no major problems develop, Blue Ghost, 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide, then will descend to the surface near the center of Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crisis — touching down on four shock-absorbing legs. Its 10 science instruments will have two full weeks, or a lunar “day,” to collect data…
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