Nyx Space and Rust Power Firefly's Blue Ghost Lunar Landing
On March 2, 2025, Firefly Aerospace will attempt to land its Blue Ghost 1 spacecraft on Mare Crisium, a vast lunar plain on the Moon. This historic mission, which you can follow via live stream on YouTube or through official updates, is powered in part by Rust—specifically, by the open-source Nyx Space libraries: Nyx, ANISE, and Hifitime.
These libraries form the backbone of the mission's flight dynamics toolset. Here’s how they’re helping guide Blue Ghost to its lunar destination.
- ANISE: Precise Trajectory Computations
- Hifitime: Synchronizing Ground and Space
- Nyx: High-Fidelity Orbit Determination
Nyx Space libraries are open source: Nyx under AGPL 3.0 and ANISE/Hifitime under MPL 2.0. By releasing these tools publicly, we aim to empower engineers across industries—from aerospace startups to academic researchers—to build robust solutions to challenging problems. Astrodynamics is hard enough as it is, use Nyx Space instead of reinventing the wheel.
ANISE: Precise Trajectory Computations
Since the 1980s, NASA's SPICE toolkit has been essential for interplanetary missions. ANISE builds upon this legacy as a modern, fully-featured rewrite in Rust. It introduces significant enhancements, including azimuth, elevation, and range (AER) computations, safe multi-threading, and Python bindings via PyO3.
For Blue Ghost, ANISE generates data products for all subsystems from the trajectory files provided by the flight dynamics team (FDO). Its accuracy has already been proven: ANISE correctly predicted the spacecraft's first eclipse to within one second of when it actually occurred—a testament to its precision.
Hifitime: Synchronizing Ground and Space
Executing maneuvers with sub-second precision is critical for mission success. The FDO team—led by Chris Rabotin—requires that maneuvers occur within 100 milliseconds of their planned time; any deviation means that the gravitational acceleration from celestial objects like the Earth or Moon are different relative to the expectations during the maneuver planning.
Hifitime ensures this precision by handling time scale conversions between Ephemeris Time (ET), used in trajectory data for its consistency in cislunar space, and UTC, which governs ground systems. ANISE complements this by calculating light-time delays between Blue Ghost and ground stations while accounting for relativistic effects such as aberration. Together, these tools ensure flawless timing synchronization between Earth and space.
Nyx: High-Fidelity Orbit Determination
Above GPS altitudes, spacecraft cannot rely on satellite navigation. Instead, they depend on ground-based tracking data processed through orbit determination algorithms. Nyx excels in this domain.
Nyx is a high-performance library for spaceflight dynamics that incorporates advanced models such as non-spherical gravity fields and solar radiation pressure. It directly ingests CCSDS TDM —the standard format for spacecraft tracking data—and processes it using its Kalman filter for high-fidelity orbit determination. This capability had previously been validated in real-world scenarios like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter example.
If you've read this far, let's chat!
