NGC Aerospace is going to the Moon on Firefly Blue Ghost Lander

Photo credits: Firefly Aerospace

SHERBROOKE, Quebec, Canada, [January 15, 2025] — Today at 1:11 a.m. EST, the Blue Ghost lunar lander developed by Firefly Aerospace was successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle and is now on its way to land in Mare Crisium on the Moon, carrying NGC Aerospace’s navigation system as a demonstration.

“Although our navigation software has already been tested on the ground using real images of the Moon, this mission will be the first operational test of our crater-based navigation system onboard a Moon orbiting vehicle” says Jean-François Hamel, Vice-President for Space Systems at NGC.

As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander will deliver 10 science and technology payloads to the Moon and operate them on the lunar surface. On this mission, the global lunar navigation system developed by NGC Aerospace will be tested and verified against Firefly’s vision navigation system upon landing. NGC’s system is capable of identifying craters from real-time camera images of the lunar surface and uses them as topographic references to localise accurately a lunar orbiter or lander. This crater-based lunar navigation system can provide high-accuracy navigation information that precisely guides spacecraft to their intended landing site similarly to the GPS satellites that are used on Earth.

“In line with NGC’s mission of shaping the future of autonomous exploration through collaboration, teaming up with Firefly provides us with the opportunity to test our state-of-the-art technology in the real environment of the Moon. This will pave the way for a technology that enables the precise navigation of lunar vehicles to high-value science targets without the need for external navigation aids” points out Jean de Lafontaine, President and CEO of NGC.

“NGC employs a very different approach to optical navigation compared to our own” says Firefly’s Blue Ghost Chief Engineer, Will Coogan. “This makes for an excellent opportunity to compare the two methods over a common dataset and learn how each method performs in both orbit and descent and at different sun elevations.”

The participation of NGC Aerospace to this mission was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Canadian Space Agency under the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program.

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