This weekend Firefly Aerospace made history with the first fully successful moon landing by a private company, and now you can watch the moment the Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon in stunning video footage.
The footage shows the lander’s final descent to the lunar surface, with views from both downward-facing and outward-facing cameras. As well as the craters covering the moon, you can also see the glare from the sun and the Earth visible in the sky.
The mission also captured this gorgeous image of sunrise on the moon, showing the sun peeking over the lunar horizon. A day on the moon lasts around fourteen Earth days, and during this time the Blue Ghost spacecraft will use solar energy collected by its solar panels for power. After two weeks of operations, on March 16, the mission will observe the lunar sunset and then operate for a final few hours into the lunar night before shutting down.
“Up next, Blue Ghost will continue NASA payload operations through March 16. Just in the last two days, our downlinked data increased from 27 GB to 57 GB, including critical science data,” Firefly announced in an update. “Surface operations performed so far include deploying Lunar PlanetVac and sampling lunar regolith, deploying the Electrodynamic Dust Shield and demonstrating dust mitigation, capturing images from SCALPSS, and continuing operations for the other payloads.”
You can see the Lunar PlanetVac instrument deployed onto the surface in this image:
The instrument will test out a method of sample collection using pneumatics, which works by firing a blast of gas at the surface. This lifts up dust and small particles, which are then collected into a chamber for imaging and sieving. If it works, this system will be a cheaper and faster way to collect samples from the moon’s surface than using complex robotic arms for the job.
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.