New Delhi: A year ago, Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its Blue Ghost Moon lander in the Sea of Crises, in the northeast quadrant of the lunar near
side. The mission exceeded expectations and relayed back 120 gigabytes of data to the Earth, after operating 10 NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) payloads for a period of two weeks on the Moon, and 45 days on the journey to the Moon. This data included extensive lunar imagery, captured during the final orbits prior to the landing, 360-degree imagery and video from the lander during the descent, the first high-resolution solar eclipse captured from the surface of the Moon, and high-resolution imagery captured during a sunset.
The lunar sunset captured by Blue Ghost. The bright object on top is the Earth, while the small white dot is Venus. (Image Credit: Firefly Aerospace).
This additional data led to a $10 million contract addendum from NASA, which was the first commercial lunar data sale, paving the way for future data services. Firefly plans to unlock even more lunar data with the Blue Ghost Mission 2, that is slated for launch no sooner than November 2026. In late 2026, Firefly Aerospace plans to offer its Ocula lunar imaging service through its fleet of Elytra orbital vehicles. Firefly plans to operate each Elytra orbiter for a period of five years, continuously capturing the lunar surface.
What Ocula can be used for
About three months after the successful landing of Blue Ghost, Firefly Aerospace first announced its plans for Ocula, using a series of orbiters whose primary goal is to deliver landers to the surface, to additionally gather observations of the surface. The Ocula service will leverage the capabilities of the Elytra orbiters to map the surface in high resolution for human and robotic missions, mapping the distribution of surface minerals, gathering situational awareness of active operations on the lunar surface, as well as space situational awareness in cislunar space, which involves visually targeting and observing other spacecraft.
