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From Flight Test to the Moon: A Tale of Three Payloads

The manifest of payloads aboard the Firefly Blue Ghost lunar lander — which launched at 1:11 a.m. EST on Jan. 15, 2025 — includes three innovations that were advanced by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. Flight testing aboard sounding rockets, high-altitude balloons, and rocket-powered landers helped research teams mature the technologies’ readiness and minimize the risk for future endeavors, such as this CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) mission. Continue reading for more information about these space technologies and how they benefitted from suborbital flight testing.

Read about the Blue Ghost launch about From Flight Test to the Moon: A Tale of Three Payloads

PlanetVac: Regolith Sample Collection | RadPC: Radiation Tolerant Computing |

LuGRE: Leveraging Earth-Based GNSS Signals | Media Gallery | Related Flight News

PlanetVac: Regolith Sample Collection 

PlanetVac uses compressed gas to gather regolith from celestial surfaces, transferring samples from a lander vehicle’s footpads through pneumatic hoses to a collection container. It takes only a few seconds to obtain the sample using virtually no power.  
 
During flight tests on Xodiac — an Astrobotic vertical takeoff vertical landing vehicle — PlanetVac successfully collected more than 220 grams of simulated regolith. Tests showed PlanetVac could survive launch/landing and successfully capture and deliver regolith samples, proving its worthiness for a lunar mission. 

Read about the PlanetVac project on TechPort  about PlanetVac: Regolith Sample Collection 

Kris Zacny

Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company

Flight Testing

2018 to 2020

No. of Flights 

5

Vehicle Platform

Rocket-Powered Lander 

RadPC: Radiation-Tolerant Computing 

Designed to provide increased computer reliability in the presence of high-energy radiation at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions, RadPC (Radiation-Tolerant Computing) successfully transitioned from Flight Opportunities testing to orbital demonstration to the Blue Ghost mission and ongoing commercialization.
 
Testing began aboard sounding rockets, including one flown by UP Aerospace, which helped demonstrate that RadPC could withstand the forces of a rocket launch. Aboard Aerostar high-altitude balloons, RadPC flew for more than 100 hours above 75,000 feet — outside of the majority of Earth’s atmosphere and thus exposed to space radiation — enabling researchers to validate various subsystems.
 
These flight demonstrations were crucial to preparing RadPC for two demonstrations on the International Space Station in 2022 as well as selection for the Blue Ghost CLPS mission.

Read about the RadPC project on TechPort  about RadPC: Radiation-Tolerant Computing 

Brock LaMeres

Montana State University 

Flight Testing

2014 to 2021

No. of Flights 

4

Vehicle Platforms

Sounding Rockets and High-Altitude Balloons 

LuGRE: Leveraging Earth-Based GNSS Signals 

The GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) refers to satellite constellations operated by the U.S., such as the Global Positioning System, or GPS, as well as the European Union and other countries. During the Blue Ghost mission, LuGRE (Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment) will demonstrate GNSS-based spacecraft navigation in transit to the Moon and on the lunar surface.

During a flight test aboard an UP Aerospace sounding rocket, the NASA-ASI team was able to demonstrate the effective use of a multi-constellation (GPS-Galileo) multi-frequency GNSS receiver on a launch vehicle. Researchers are using flight data to perform experimental evaluations of the benefits of interoperability between GPS and Galileo constellations. The effort with Flight Opportunities provided extremely valuable data to aid in ongoing research and optimization of the technology.

Read more about using GNSS on the Moon about LuGRE: Leveraging Earth-Based GNSS Signals 

j.j. miller

NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) 

Flight Testing

2024

No. of Flights 

1

Vehicle Platform

Sounding Rocket