As the Firefly Aerospace mission known as Blue Ghost makes it way to the moon, it is snapping some gorgeous images as it goes — including striking images of Earth in its rearview mirror. Now, the company has released the most stunning image so far, showing the planet Earth and its reflection bouncing off the smooth surface of a solar panel on the spacecraft.
Blue Ghost was launched last month, and has been orbiting around Earth to adjust its trajectory before heading off toward the moon. This week, the spacecraft performed a maneuver called Trans Lunar Injection, in which it fires its engines to start heading away from Earth and toward the moon.
It will take several days for the spacecraft to arrive at the moon, at which point it will fire its engines again to enter into a lunar orbit. From there, it will adjust its orbit over several weeks before coming in to land on the moon’s surface. The company is hoping to be just the second ever commercial entity to successfully perform a soft landing on the moon.
As well as the image showing our planet reflected in the spacecraft’s solar panel, it also snapped this image of Earth as it recedes from view. With the journey to the moon well underway, the spacecraft is also sending back data from its various payloads, which include a variety of NASA experiments and technology tests.
“Now four weeks into the mission, Blue Ghost has downlinked more than 15 GB of data, including NASA science data, from record-breaking GNSS signals to magnetic field measurements, that is already unlocking insights for the future of space exploration,” Firefly Aerospace wrote in an update.
The payloads carried on the spacecraft include an experimental method for collecting samples of the dusty material covering the surface of the moon, called regolith, by firing a jet of gas as the surface and collecting and photographing this material.
There is also an experiment into using electrical fields to prevent dust from building up on surfaces, which can be a major problem for moon missions as the lack of atmosphere on the moon means that the dust there is very sharp and abrasive, and can quickly eat through materials like seals. The aim is to test out technologies which can be used for human exploration of the moon under NASA’s Artemis program.
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.