WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Firefly Aerospace became the second U.S. company to land on the moon on Sunday with its debut Blue Ghost lander, kicking off a two-week research mission as one of a handful of private firms to reach the frontlines of a global moon race.

The size of a compact car, the four-legged Blue Ghost carried 10 scientific payloads as it touched down at 3:35am ET (0835 GMT) near an ancient volcanic vent on Mare Crisium, a large basin in the northeast corner of the moon's Earth-facing side.

Flight controllers at Firefly's Austin, Texas headquarters watched as Blue Ghost descended toward the moon's surface at a gentle two miles per hour, confirming on a live stream that the spacecraft had entered lunar gravity.

"We're on the moon," declared Will Coogan, Blue Ghost Chief Engineer at Firefly Aerospace, from mission control.

Firefly became the second private firm to score a soft moon landing. Houston-based Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander made a lopsided soft touchdown last year. Five nations have made successful soft landings in the past - the then-Soviet Union, the U.S., China, India and, last year, Japan.

Flight controllers at Firefly's Austin, Texas, headquarters had sent final commands to Blue Ghost as it lowered its lunar orbit, flying about 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth a month and a half after launching atop a SpaceX rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed, and then after, we saw everything was stable and upright," Firefly CEO Jason Kim said on stage at a company watch event in Austin. In the audience were hundreds of Firefly employees, space industry officials and senior NASA leaders, including the agency's acting administrator Janet Petro.

The moonshot by Firefly, an upstart primarily building rockets, is one of three lunar missions actively in progress. Japan's ispace launched its second lander on the same rocket as Firefly's in January, before Intuitive Machines embarked on its second lunar mission on Wednesday.

Two navigation cameras onboard Blue Ghost were used to spot hazards on the lunar surface during its final descent, helping the spacecraft steer toward an ideal landing spot. Impact sensors on the craft's four carbon-composite legs triggered Blue Ghost's engine to shutdown upon landing.

Two solar panels on the side and one of the top will power the lander and its research instruments for a 14-day mission on the moon, before the frigid lunar night brings temperatures as low as minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius).

Backed by NASA and its flagship Artemis moon program, private companies are playing an outsized role in the modern moon race with the hopes of stimulating a lunar market. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are building landers to put U.S. astronauts on the moon as soon as 2027 for the first time since 1972.

CROWDED MOON RACE

Missions like Firefly's Blue Ghost represent low-budget precursor missions to the moon that will enable research into the lunar environment before the U.S. sends its astronauts there. Firefly has a $101 million NASA contract for the mission.

China, meanwhile, is making swift progress in its own moon efforts, with its robotic Chang'e lunar program and plans to put Chinese astronauts on the moon's surface by 2030. Also eyeing the moon are U.S.-aligned Japan and India, which made its first soft lunar landing in 2023.

On Blue Ghost, two onboard instruments will study the lunar soil and its subsurface temperatures in experiments by Honeybee Robotics, a firm owned by Blue Origin, which is developing its own lunar lander to send humans to the moon for NASA's Artemis program later this decade.

NASA's Langley Research Center has a stereo camera on board to analyze the lunar dirt plumes kicked up by Blue Ghost's landing engine, gathering data to help researchers predict the dusty surface material's dispersal during heavier moon missions in the future.

Research into landing plumes is a prominent technical issue at the center of discussions on how countries such as the U.S. and China will coexist on nearby areas of the moon. Plume behavior is a factor behind the "safety zones" envisioned by NASA's space safety pact, the Artemis Accords, to prevent interference or damage to prospective neighbors on the moon.