Lunar Rover (Blue Ghost Mission 3)

DESCRIPTION

Lunar Rover (Blue Ghost Mission 3) is a Mobile-Robots from Honeybee Robotics. It is built for Exploration, Research, Lunar surface exploration and in-situ geochemical science (Lunar-VISE). Key figures: 100 kg.

Honeybee Robotics' lunar rover is a 100 kg-class planetary rover being built for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 3, which NASA has tasked with exploring the Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon's near side - a region never visited before. Firefly selected Honeybee, a Blue Origin company, in March 2025, and the mission is scheduled for 2028. Firefly's Elytra Dark transfer vehicle will place the Blue Ghost lander in lunar orbit and stay there to relay communications. Blue Ghost will land among the domes and deploy the rover, then support about 14 days of surface operations. The rover carries elements of NASA's Lunar-VISE (Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer) suite: an infrared multispectral camera system and a spectrometer that measures gamma-ray and neutron emissions to study the subsurface composition of the Gruithuisen Gamma Dome. It will drive along the dome's southern edge and through a boulder field to the rim of a young impact crater, then return to the lander before sunset to re-observe boulders under different lighting. Blue Origin's Exploration Systems group builds the rover's hardware, avionics, software, navigation and path planning, leads payload integration, and helps deploy and operate the instruments. It draws on Honeybee hardware that has worked on Mars since 2004 and on the PlanetVac and LISTER payloads it operated on Firefly's first Blue Ghost landing in March 2025.

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