NASA Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Launch to the Moon: When, Where, and How to Watch

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost moon lander is set to launch on Wednesday, January 15, bringing NASA’s innovative payloads to the lunar surface. The mission promises fresh insights into Earth's magnetosphere and its interaction with space weather.

Mission details and launch
The Blue Ghost lander is set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday, 15 January, at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT). The launch will take place from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Among the 10 payloads aboard Blue Ghost is NASA’s Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI). This innovative X-ray instrument uses nine lobster-eye micropore optical elements to monitor how solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere. Positioned on the moon, LEXI will provide a global view of the magnetosphere’s behaviour, tracking how it expands and contracts in response to solar wind.

"We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and in," said Hyunju Connor, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "It will shrink when the solar wind strengthens and expand when it weakens."

Insights and impact
LEXI’s observations could offer critical insights into space weather’s effects on Earth. Such data may help protect satellites and ground-based systems, including power grids.