The following robotic lander to launch to the moon was revealed as we speak (June 15) by Pittsburgh-based firm Astrobotic.
NASA selected Astrobotic’s Griffin automobile to be the lander for its Moon Base II mission, a part of the primary part of the company’s efforts to determine a everlasting lunar outpost. Astrobotic is focusing on late 2026 to launch Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), which is able to carry off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The lander is contracted to ship a number of analysis and expertise demonstrations to the floor of the moon as a part of NASA’s Industrial Lunar Payload Companies (CLPS) program, together with the FLIP (Flex Lunar Innovation Platform) rover from California-based firm Astrolab.
“That is the primary infrastructure-class lander going to the floor of the moon,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton stated throughout as we speak’s occasion. “This lander will probably be a part of the cornerstone of constructing the moon base on the floor of the moon, so I am simply so excited for it to be right here as we speak, and to want it good travels because it heads out to JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] for environmental testing,”
Integration at the company’s headquarters is expected to wrap up this week, with a number of payloads already incorporated onto the lander. Those payloads include Astrobotic’s own BEACON CubeRover, in coordination with Mission Control Space Services, and the European Space Agency‘s LandCam-X, designed to help improve lunar landing precision and reliability on future missions.
Griffin-1 is scheduled for transportation to JPL in California next week for environmental testing, ahead of its delivery to Florida in the coming months, where the FLIP rover will be integrated into the lander prior to launch.
The mission will be the second from Astrobotic that shoots for the moon, after the debut of the company’s smaller Peregrine lunar lander in January 2024. Peregrine experienced a propellant leak shortly after deploying into space, however, and never reached its destination.
In addition to being the company’s first lander, Peregrine Mission One was the first-ever NASA CLPS flight. Through CLPS, NASA is partnering with commercial companies to provide lunar landers to deliver technology demonstrations and other payloads to the surface of the moon. The program aims to support NASA’s Artemis program, through which the agency plans to establish a lunar base and eventual sustained human presence on the surface.
Griffin is considerably larger than Peregrine. Though both landers stand roughly 6 feet (2 meters) tall, Griffin is nearly twice as wide, measuring nearly 15 feet (4.5 meters) across. Astrobotic advertises the big lander’s payload capacity to the lunar surface at 1,377 pounds (625 kilograms), with a cost of $544,000 per pound ($1.2 million per kilogram).
In total, Griffin-1 will carry 10 payloads from six separate nations, with four additional NASA payloads aboard FLIP. Some of the smaller payloads on the Griffin lander include a plaque from the Nippon Travel Agency, with messages collected from children in Japan to send to the moon; the Galactic Library to Preserve Humanity from Nanofiche that’s carrying a super miniaturized repository of literature and art; and a MoonBox capsule that will deliver items from around the world submitted to the Tokyo-based company Astrobotic on micro SD cards.
“So, this is going to be chock full of interesting science and data that’s going to be coming back from the moon, and some of the best imagery we have seen yet coming back from the surface,” Thornton said.
