People across the US were stunned by the lunar eclipse last night — but for one observer on the moon, it wasn’t a lunar eclipse but rather a solar one. The Blue Ghost spacecraft from Firefly Aerospace, currently at home in the moon’s Mars Crisium basin, got the opposite view from us here on the planet as the Earth appeared to pass in front of the sun.
Eclipses happen when the moon, the Earth, and the sun are in a straight line so that we see the Earth’s shadow appearing to turn the moon red, while on the moon the Earth appears to block out the sun. Luckily Blue Ghost was able to capture a gorgeous image of the eclipse, seen above, at around 4:30 a.m. ET.
“The photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth,” Firefly wrote in an update. “This marks the first time in history a commercial company was actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously as the lunar eclipse we witnessed on Earth.”
The lander also captured a super cool video of the eclipse, stitched together from a series of photos with different exposures to allow for the different amount of light present over time. The moon’s surface appears to be red because of the way sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere, making for a spooky lunar environment. If you look closely you’ll see it appears as if there are two versions of the solar eclipse, as the bottom one is a reflection of the eclipse in the lander’s solar panel.
Other images have been coming in from Blue Ghost this week too, including this stunning view of the sun just as the solar eclipse began, taken at around 1:30 a.m. ET:
And the lander has also captured our own planet as well as the sun, like this image of Earth as seen from the moon:
Blue Ghost will continue its operations on the moon including capturing a lunar sunset before the end of the mission 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.