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. To land safely on the Moon, Firefly will verify their vision navigation system against NGC’s state-of-the-art image processing crater-based navigation system software.
“This will be the first operational demonstration of our crater-based navigation system, designed to support high-accuracy Moon landing missions” says Jean-François Hamel, Vice-President for Space Exploration at NGC. This project is also Firefly’s first lunar mission.
This mission ties closely with the set vision that NGC has elaborated and continues to develop. “Teaming up with Firefly Aerospace for this trip to the Moon is a significant step forward in NGC’s strategic plan for its contribution to space exploration”, points out Jean de Lafontaine, President and CEO of NGC. “Moreover, providing software to precisely navigate to high-value science targets on this and future missions for a leading team of the NASA CLPS initiative is an honour and a badge of recognition to the outstanding work performed by our team in Sherbrooke.”
“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 scientific opportunity to compare the two methods over a common dataset, and to fortify mission assurance in the same stroke.”
NGC Aerospace acknowledges the financial support of the Canadian Space Agency.
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