US private spaceship is close to making a daring touchdown on the Moon

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting landing around 3:34 am US Eastern time (0834 GMT) on Sunday.

It is aiming to make the landing at a site near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the Moon's northeastern near side.

"Blue Ghost is ready to take the wheel!" The company posted on X on Saturday evening, adding flight controllers had just initiated a key maneuver that lowered a spacecraft's orbit.

Nicknamed "Ghost Riders in the Sky," the mission comes just a year after the first-ever commercial lunar landing.

It is part of a NASA partnership with industry to cut costs and support Artemis.

The program aims to return astronauts to the Moon.

The golden lander, about the size of a hippopotamus, was launched on January 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

It has so far captured footage of Earth and the Moon as it travelled through the space. It shared a ride with a Japanese company's lander set to attempt a landing in May.

Blue Ghost carries ten instruments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the Moon, said reports.