A six-day window for the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching the missions begins early Wednesday morning (Jan. 15), with liftoff scheduled for 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT) from Launch Complex-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
The Falcon 9 will carry both landers to Earth orbit, where each will begin independent trajectories toward the moon. Ghost Riders in the Sky, the mission for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander, is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to deliver scientific payloads to the surface of the moon. The second lander, Resilience, comes from Japan-based company ispace, and is the second mission the company has flown in an attempt to land on the moon. Ispace's Mission 2 will deploy after Blue Ghost and will take about four times longer to complete its mission.
Blue Ghost will spend 25 days orbiting Earth ahead of an engine burn to set its trajectory toward the moon. After another 20 days — four in transit, plus another 16 in lunar orbit — if everything performs nominally, the lander will autonomously touch down in Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") to begin two weeks of lunar science.
Blue Ghost's 60-day mission from Earth to the moon will end about five hours after night falls on the lander's location. The spacecraft will preserve the last of its battery power to capture an image of the lunar sunset before powering down.
Source: www.space.com
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