Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission, launched earlier this month on a mission to the moon, has captured stunning video of the Earth eclipsing the sun as seen from space. The Blue Ghost lander is currently in orbit around the Earth, adjusting its trajectory so it can head toward the moon over the next several weeks. And while it is there, it has been collecting data using its science instruments and testing out its communication system.
“5 days into our mission and we’ve traveled 220,000 miles while downlinking 1.4 GB of data!” Firefly announced earlier this week. “There’s a long road ahead, but our #GhostRiders have already accomplished so much!”
The company also shared this first image of the lander in space, which shows some of the six NASA payloads that are on board the spacecraft — including an X-ray instrument called LEXI which will look back at the Earth’s magnetosphere from the moon in the X-ray wavelength.
The latest update from the mission is this video clip, showing the Earth moving in front of the sun and creating an eclipse:
In addition, Firefly Aerospace also confirmed that it has acquired a signal from an experiment from NASA and the Italian Space Agency called the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE). This payload was able to make a connection with the global satellite system here on Earth from a distance of 205,674 miles, which is a new record. “This step towards establishing a navigation solution to the Moon marks another successful milestone for Firefly’s payload partners traveling aboard Blue Ghost,” the company wrote.
“This achievement suggests that Earth-based GNSS constellations can be used for navigation at nearly 90% of the distance to the Moon, an Earth-Moon signal distance record,” NASA wrote about the achievement. “It also demonstrates the power of using multiple GNSS constellations together, such as GPS and Galileo, to perform navigation.”
Now, the Blue Ghost will continue its 25-day orbit of Earth before undertaking a four-day journey to the moon, aiming to enter lunar orbit in early March.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.