Blue Ghost Mission 4¶
Firefly Aerospace · Blue Ghost with the Elytra orbiter · manifested
Launch: 2029 (Wikipedia). Landing: 2029 (target).
Target the South Pole region. NASA's CS-6 page lists four NASA payloads; NASA's July 2025 release lists five NASA-sponsored payloads, adding a CSA rover. The CSA rover carries a NASA-contributed thermal imaging radiometer built by APL; NASA counts it within the rover. MoonRanger was first manifested on the cancelled Masten Mission One. LIMS is 'Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometer' in the release and 'Laser Ablations Ionization Mass Spectrometer' on the CS-6 page.
Wikipedia: no article on this mission; the article Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost covers it in its section Blue Ghost M4.
| Payload | Kind | FO | Earlier flights | On the Moon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laser Ablation Ionization Mass Spectrometer (LIMS); NASA's July 2025 release calls it the Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometer | NASA payload | none | none found | not yet flown |
| MoonRanger | NASA payload | company-level | Earth orbit or deep space | not yet flown |
| Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS); NASA's CS-6 page says 'SCALPSS 1.x', the team's own slides list this unit as SCALPSS 2.0 | NASA payload | none | earlier lunar mission | not yet flown |
| Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) | NASA payload | none | Earth orbit or deep space, earlier lunar mission | not yet flown |
| CSA rover (Canadian Space Agency Lunar Rover Mission, LRM), with NASA's LAFORGE thermal imaging radiometer | partner payload | none | Earth orbit or deep space | not yet flown |