NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace, a company in Cedar Park, Texas, a $ 93.3 million contract to carry out a mission to conduct experiments and test new technologies on the Moon. In 2023, the company’s Blue Ghost lander will hit Mare Crisium, a 300-mile-wide basin on the nearby side of the satellite.
It will carry about 207 pounds of equipment to study the lunar surface. One of its ten instruments will take X-rays of the Earth to study the solar winds of the sun, while another will drill into the moon to collect data on its thermal properties. Another instrument will serve as a target for a NASA laser and Firefly will determine the exact distance between the earth and the moon.
The entire mission, which Firefly will mostly carry out alone, will be conducted in NASA’s Artemis program. As part of the project, the agency awarded contracts to companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin to speed up the timeline. But over the past few weeks, it’s unclear whether NASA will achieve its ambitious 2024 goal of putting humans back on the moon.
At the end of January, it appeared that the agency had quietly pushed back the allocation period for two land contracts from the end of February to the end of April. In addition, in its latest spending bill, Congress allocated only $ 850 million to NASA’s Human Landing System project, instead of the $ 3.2 billion requested by the agency.