Two lunar landers head to ancient impact sites. What you need to know

The moon is where you need to be right now. Commercial spacecraft are preparing to land on the lunar surface, unpacking an array of tools and instruments to explore different regions of the Moon. Two of these robotic explorers hitchhike to the moon, each taking a unique path to uncover its history and evolution while paving the way for future human missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue ghost ispace’s lander and Resilience are ready to travel to the moon aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket will be launched during a six-day window in mid-January. The pair of landers heralds a new era of lunar exploration as the commercial space industry ramps up efforts to regularly deliver payloads to the moon.

Both probes target different lunar mares—flat, dark plains formed by ancient impacts on the Moon and later filled with lava and other material over the years. Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission is carrying 10 science instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. The lander is aimed at Mare Crisium, the site of an ancient asteroid impact site once filled with basaltic lava. The basalts at Mare Crisium are between 2.5 and 3.3 billion years old, according to NASA.

After landing at Mare Crisium, Blue Ghost will operate for a full lunar day (the equivalent of 14 Earth days), capturing images of a lunar sunset and collecting data on how the Moon’s regolith responds to solar influences during lunar twilight, according to Texas Firefly. The lander will operate for about seven hours during the lunar night.

The Blue Ghost payloads are designed to test lunar regolith sampling, radiation tolerance, a Moon-based global navigation system and other technologies to inform future missions.

Tokyo-based startup ispace is gearing up for its own mission to the moon. The Resilience lander is to carry a small rover called Tenacious to a region called Mare Frigoris located in the far northern regions of the Moon. It is also full of scientific instruments, mainly from commercial space enterprises in Japan, designed to explore the lunar surface.

This marks ispace’s second attempt to land on the lunar surface after a less than successful first attempt. In April 2023 the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lunar probe. fell to the moon and crashed on its surface. The Hakuto-R M1 carried both commercial and government payloads, including a small, two-wheeled transformable robot from the Japanese space agency.

Although the two missions will launch on the same rocket, each will follow a different route to the Moon. Firefly’s Blue Ghost will remain in Earth orbit for about 25 days before entering lunar orbit, where it will spend 16 days before attempting to touch down on the moon’s surface, according to SpaceNews. Resilience, on the other hand, will follow a much longer path to the Moon, first operating in an elliptical transfer orbit before using a lunar flyby to transition to a low-energy transfer trajectory that will then allow it to attempt a soft landing. The Japanese startup’s first mission to the moon took about four and a half months to reach the surface.

It may not be a race to reach the moon, but the lunar surface is expected to see more visitors dropping payloads across its dusty terrain in the next few years as NASA and other space agencies plan for a sustained human presence on Earth’s moon.