Firefly Picks Honeybee Robotics For Lunar Mission Rover | Aero-News Network
Aero-News Network
RSS icon RSS feed
podcast icon MP3 podcast
Subscribe Aero-News e-mail Newsletter Subscribe

Airborne Unlimited -- Most Recent Daily Episodes

Episode Date

Airborne-Monday

Airborne-Tuesday

Airborne-Wednesday Airborne-Thursday

Airborne-Friday

Airborne On YouTube

Airborne-Unlimited-06.23.25

Airborne-NextGen-06.24.25

AirborneUnlimited-06.25.25

Airborne-AffordableFlyers-06.26.25

AirborneUnlimited-06.27.25

Fri, Apr 04, 2025

Firefly Picks Honeybee Robotics For Lunar Mission Rover

Blue Origin’s Vehicle To Explore Gruithuisen Domes In 2028

Firefly Aerospace announced it has selected Blue Origin’s Honeybee Robotics as its partner to provide the rover vehicle for its third Lunar mission in 2028 to explore and study the geological history and potential resources at the Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon’s near side.

The agreement with Honeybee reinforces an emerging trend of leveraging established space technologies even among competitors to advance human understanding and exploration of the Moon’s surface.

Firefly’s first Lunar mission went off without a hitch earlier this month when its Blue Ghost lander delivered 10 NASA instruments and operated for two weeks when it concluded on March 16. The company’s first commercial Lunar landing mission operated for the full 14 days of daytime surface with 346 hours of daylight followed by operating for 5 additional hours into the lunar night, representing the longest commercial operations on the Moon thus far.

The company’s mission with Honeybee’s rover will be the third under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and will also include Firefly’s Elytra Dark orbital vehicle. Elytra will serve as the transfer vehicle and deploy the Blue Ghost lander with the rover, then remain on orbit to provide communications with Earth.

As the Honeybee rover explores the Domes, Blue Ghost will operate six NASA-sponsored payloads on the surface for 14 days.

The NASA instruments include a Lunar imaging and spectroscopy explorer; a sample acquisition, morphology and regolith probe; radio wave observations; neutron measurements; and photovoltaic investigations. A sixth payload is for the Planetary Science Institute.

In 2026, Firefly will conduct the second commercial mission for NASA to the Moon as well as the deployment of the Lunar Pathfinder satellite into orbit around the Moon for the European Space Agency.

The Blue Ghost will land  on the Lunar far side and carry out government and commercial payload operations for more than ten days.

FMI:  fireflyspace.com/

Advertisement

More News

NTSB Final Report: Rutan Long-EZ

He Attempted To Restart The Engine Three Times. On The Third Restart Attempt, He Noticed That Flames Were Coming Out From The Right Wing Near The Fuel Cap Analysis: The pilot repor>[...]

ANN FAQ: Turn On Post Notifications

Make Sure You NEVER Miss A New Story From Aero-News Network Do you ever feel like you never see posts from a certain person or page on Facebook or Instagram? Here’s how you c>[...]

Classic Aero-TV: ICAS Perspectives - Advice for New Air Show Performers

From 2009 (YouTube Edition): Leading Air Show Performers Give Their Best Advice for Newcomers On December 6th through December 9th, the Paris Las Vegas Hotel hosted over 1,500 air >[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (06.28.25)

Aero Linx: NASA ASRS ASRS captures confidential reports, analyzes the resulting aviation safety data, and disseminates vital information to the aviation community. The ASRS is an i>[...]

Aero-News: Quote of the Day (06.28.25)

“For our inaugural Pylon Racing Seminar in Roswell, we were thrilled to certify 60 pilots across our six closed-course pylon race classes. Not only did this year’s PRS >[...]

blog comments powered by Disqus



Advertisement

Advertisement

Podcasts

Advertisement

© 2007 - 2025 Web Development & Design by Pauli Systems, LC