With the Blue Ghost lunar mission coming to an end this week, the spacecraft has gifted scientists and the public with an incredible send-off. The moon lander captured the first ever HD imagery of a sunset as seen from the moon, and the images have been stitched together into a video.
The stunning footage shows the sun setting over the moon’s horizon; an event which happens on the moon just one per month. A lunar day lasts for two weeks, and the Blue Ghost used this time to perform its experiments on the moon’s surface and collect solar power from the sun. Then the two-week-long lunar night begins and it is too dark for the spacecraft to collect power — but first, the lander got to observe one last sight of the sun setting.
“Lunar sunset imagery that was captured by Blue Ghost from different camera angles on March 16,” Firefly Aerospace wrote sharing the footage. “These images, stitched together in a video, show a horizon glow that comes to life just above the Moon’s surface as the sun goes down. Earth and Venus (further in the distance) are also shown above the Moon. The NASA science team is excited to analyze these images further and share more on the findings soon.”
The mission landed on March 2 and officially came to an end on 6:15 p.m. CT on March 16, with the spacecraft having saved enough power to operate for five hours into the lunar night and to collect data on the nighttime conditions there as well.
Other private companies have had varying levels of success in their lunar missions, like Intuitive Machines which has completed soft landings on the moon twice but had both its landers fall over, or ispace which has failed at one lunar landing but has another landing attempt coming up soon. But the Blue Ghost mission is notable for being successful in meeting all of its mission objectives on the first go, with landing, surface operations, and lunar night observations all achieved.
“After a flawless Moon landing, the Firefly team immediately moved into surface operations to ensure all 10 NASA payloads could capture as much science as possible during the lunar day,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace.
“We’re incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled from tracking GPS signals on the Moon for the first time to robotically drilling and collecting science deeper into the lunar surface than ever before. We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moons, Mars, and beyond.”
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.