Just ahead of a planned lunar landing this weekend, Firefly Aerospace has shared more gorgeous footage from its Blue Ghost mission. Currently in low lunar orbit, the spacecraft is passing within 60 miles of the moon’s surface and has captured a stunning video as it sweeps over the surface of the moon.
“Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured more incredible footage of the Moon during its third lunar orbit maneuver on February 24 that inserted the spacecraft in a near-circular low lunar orbit,” Firefly wrote in an update. “The video below, sped up by 10X, was taken about 100 km above the lunar surface, showing the far side of the Moon and a top-down view of Blue Ghost’s RCS thrusters (center) and radiator panels on each side. The radiator panels are moving nominally to protect Blue Ghost’s subsystems from extreme temperatures.”
The spacecraft is coming in for a landing attempt on Sunday, March 2, when it will attempt to softly touch down on the moon’s surface in a region called Mare Crisium. The descent process takes around one hour, which will be a nail-biting time to see if the craft can avoid the hazards of the moon’s surface like the many boulders and craters and land safely. Once landed, the spacecraft will spend two weeks taking science data and testing out technological experiments on the moon, including instruments from universities and NASA.
Over the last six weeks since its launch on January 15, Blue Ghost has captured stunning footage of the Earth as seen from space, the moon as it approaches, and even a view of the Earth rising and setting behind the moon. This new video is the mission’s closest view yet of the moon’s surface, showing the deep craters and basins and the mountains and ridges that cover it.
The moon’s surface has a particularly dramatic appearance as it lacks atmosphere, so there are no winds to erode surface features and no plate tectonics to recycle rocks from the surface. That means that the history of impacts from large and small meteorites can be seen all over the surface, giving clues to the history of the moon and of the solar system more broadly.
The Blue Ghost mission will land on the moon’s near side, and will observe during the lunar day (which lasts for 14 Earth days) as well as observing lunar sunset on March 16.
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.