5.09.2025

This artist’s concept of Blue Ghost Mission 4 shows Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander and NASA payloads in the lunar South Pole Region, through NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative.) The Canadian rover built by Canadensys Aerospace is pictured on the left. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

We now know when Canada’s first lunar rover will launch to the moon. Firefly Aerospace was recently awarded a contract from NASA to deliver five payloads to the Moon’s south pole in 2029 including Canada’s lunar rover.

While the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) had originally hoped for an earlier launch, “2026 or later,” the news is still welcome. 

This rover mission will be over a decade in the making. The collaborative effort is led by Canadensys Aerospace, is supported by a number of partners with the funding from the CSA through the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP).

Canadensys  Aerospace

Canadensys and its partners got the official $43M CSA LEAP contract to build the first Canadian lunar rover in 2022, but had been working on developing rover technology going back to 2017 and earlier, as seen in previous SpaceQ coverage.
They also received previous awards to explore lunar rover technology in 2019 as part of the CSA’s Lunar Exploration Analogue Deployment (LEAD) announcement of opportunity. At the time, Dr. Nadeem Ghafoor, then a Vice-President, Space Exploration at Canadensys, told SpaceQ that the company had spent that time working on “ruggedizing modern, low-cost robotic and spacecraft technologies so that they can last for operationally useful periods and/or distances on the lunar surface.”
That work paid off, and they got the nod from the CSA in 2022 to develop Canada’s lunar rover. According to the announcement, it would “fly as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and would land in the south polar region of the Moon as early as 2026,” and “help in the international search for water ice in the lunar soil.”

It’s tough landing on the moon

It might seem surprising that this rover mission said to be “starting in 2026” was seemingly delayed for nearly three years. These kinds of delays are common in space, however. “Space is hard” is a cliche for a reason, and setbacks are part of the game. In the case of Canadensys, they’ve received several setbacks in their efforts to reach the lunar surface, though entirely through no fault of their own. Several high-profile efforts that integrated Canadensys technology have ultimately either crashed into the Moon’s surface or landed in suboptimal positions.

Both of ispace’s Hakuto-R landers failed to land safely, for example. The original Hakuto-R lander had a hard landing due to issues with its Laser Range Finder, while the second lander ran out of propellant due to a computer error that caused it to misjudge its altitude. Canadensys actually contributed technology to the Hakuto-R, providing an AI-powered 360-degree imaging system that was intended to take images of the lander’s voyage and descent, as well as of its Rashid lunar rovers.

The Canadensys imaging system aboard the first Hakuto-R lander did its job, getting in-space pictures of Earth from the POV of the ispace lander, but never got its opportunity to capture on-the-regolith imagery of the Moon’s surface.

Canadensys also contributed technology to Intuitive Machines’ attempts to land on the Moon, which had challenges as well. Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission in 2024 successfully reached the lunar surface and executed a soft landing, but tipped over to a 30 degree angle, owing to an issue with the safety switch for the laser sensor. (The MDA-built sensor was fine, but the safety switch wasn’t disabled before launch.) Canadensys had provided cameras for the mission. 
Their second mission, IM-2, also landed “somewhat on its side,” preventing it from fully carrying out its mission, and also had Canadensys high-resolution cameras on board. 

In all of these cases, the Canadensys payloads and technologies appear to have functioned without issue. But, unfortunately and unavoidably (by Canadensys at least) they still couldn’t chalk up an unambiguous win. 

Firefly’s Blue Ghost success and coming missions

Firefly Aerospace, however, finally pulled it off with their Blue Ghost lander, executing the first fully-successful soft landing by a commercial company last March. There were three Canadian payloads aboard Blue Ghost Mission 1: A lunar navigation system by NGC Aerospace, a material sample testing system by Integrity Testing Laboratory, and an imaging system from Canadensys that was built for “monitoring the Honeybee Robotics Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) system.”  

The Blue Ghost mission was a success, and so were the Canadian payloads. That success likely contributed to Firefly Aerospace’s successful IPO in early August, which raised USD$868.3M at a $6.32 billion valuation. Considering the company’s issues in the late 2010s, this has been a truly impressive turnaround.

Following those successes, Firefly Aerospace has three other Blue Ghost missions coming up.

Blue Ghost Mission 2, which is going to debut their stack of the Blue Ghost lander and the Elytra Dark orbital vehicle, will be headed to the far side of the moon sometime in 2026 with a payload from Fleet Space. That mission was commissioned by NASA in 2023.
Blue Ghost Mission 3 was commissioned in late 2024, and will be headed to the Gruithuisen Domes in 2028 with payloads from Maxar Technologies, NASA, the Planetary Science Institute, and the University of Central Florida with Arizona State University and BAE Systems. 

And now there’s Blue Ghost Mission 4 which is scheduled for 2029. According to NASA, this will be “the first time NASA will use multiple rovers and a variety of stationary instruments,” in a collaboration with both the CSA (with Canadensys) and the University of Bern. It will “help us understand the chemical composition of the lunar South Pole region and discover the potential for using resources available in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon.” Firefly will receive USD$176.7M for the mission.

Blue Ghost 4’s instruments and rovers

As NASA said, there will be a variety of rovers and instruments aboard the Blue Ghost bound for the lunar South Pole in 2029. 

The as-yet-unnamed 35kg CSA rover, built and integrated by Canadensys, will include several payloads. These include:

• A Lunar Hydrogen Autonomous Neutron Spectrometer (LHANS), from Bubble Technology Industries, which will detect hydrogen as well as key elements like iron and calcium.
• A  Frozen Regolith Observation and Science Tools (FROST) imaging suite, made by Canadensys, which will include three smaller payloads: a Lyman-Alpha Imager that aids in identifying surface water ice, a Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) that can identify the mineralogy in the lunar soil, and an MSI-Macro which works similarly to the MSI but in higher resolution.
• A Radiation Micro-Dosimeter, which will help  scientists estimate how much radiation humans and lunar infrastructure will be exposed to on the lunar surface.
• A NASA-contributed thermal imaging radiometer from the Applied Physics Laboratory, which (according to NASA) will “advance our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of the lunar surface, the geological history of the Moon, and potential resources such as water ice.”

The scientific lead on the CSA project will be planetary geologist Gordon “Oz” Osinski of Western University. Other scientific partners will be Simon Fraser University, the University of Alberta, Western University and York University, the University of Winnipeg, and the Université de Sherbrooke, as well as international partners from Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, Oxford University, University College London, and the University of Hawaii.
Industry partners include Toronto’s Encoded Mountain, Halifax’s Leap Biosystem, Montreal’s Maya HTT, Sherbrooke’s NGC Aerospace, and Waves in Space Corporation from Cambridge, Ontario. The ground communications will be provided by Norway’s Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT).   

In an interview with the BBC, Canadensys president Dr. Christian Sallaberger said that the rover mission is part of the company’s “broader strategy of really moving humanity off the Earth,” adding that “if you design something that can survive on the lunar surface long-term, you’re pretty bulletproof anywhere else in the solar system.”

Aside from the CSA rover, it includes an autonomous microrover called “MoonRanger,” developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University and Astrobotic. MoonRanger will collect imagery and telemetry data, as well use a Neutron Spectormeter System to “study hydrogen-bearing volatiles and the composition of lunar regolith.” 

Fixed (non-rover) payloads includes the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies from NASA’s Langley Research Center, which NASA said “will use enhanced stereo imaging photogrammetry, active illumination, and ejecta impact detection sensors to capture the impact of the [lander’s] rocket exhaust plume on lunar regolith,” and a Laser Retroreflective Array from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that will “serve as a permanent location marker on the Moon for decades to come.”

It also includes a Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometer from the University of Bern, that will “analyze the element and isotope composition of lunar regolith” by taking regolith samples via a “Firefly-built robotic arm and Titanium shovel” and funneling them into a collecting unit for analysis using pulsed laser beams.

Quelle: spaceQ