First private moon lander to touch down safely starts sending selfies

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost planned to work for 14 days, should be useful for years thanks to its reflector that improves on Apollo-era tech

Sunday March 2nd has become a notable day in humanity’s exploration of outer space, after Firefly Aerospace became the first private company to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon.

Firefly’s mission launched on January 15, using a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket, and took a leisurely path to the Moon. The company’s Blue Ghost lander touched Lunar soil in Mare Crisium at 2:34 a.m. Central Standard Time on March 2, after a soft landing that left it in “an upright, stable configuration.”

The craft landed within 100 meters of its target, after a pair of hazard avoidance maneuvers informed by a “vision-based terrain relative navigation” systems that examine terrain beneath the lander to find a flat and safe spot to touch down.

Firefly has since captured a few pics of the craft and the spot it’s landed, and deployed an X-band antenna that will mean future photos and other data flow more quickly.

Blue Ghost’s shadow seen on the Moon’s surface - Click to enlarge

Blue Ghost carries 10 NASA payloads. Over the next 14 days they’ll be used for jobs including subsurface drilling, sample collection, X-ray imaging, and dust mitigation experiments. On March 14, Firefly hopes to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse when the Earth blocks the sun above the Moon’s horizon. Two days later, the outfit plans to snap the lunar sunset to gather “data on how lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow first documented by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17.”

Blue Ghost’s selfie of its antenna and instruments - Click to enlarge

After the sun sets, Blue Ghost’s mission will probably end because Lunar nights are punishingly cold and few craft survive them. Firefly will try to operate for five hours after sunset.

If Blue Ghost doesn’t wake up, it will still remain useful as one of its payloads is the Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector, a device that reflects light. They’re used by shining lasers at them, then measuring transit time as they bounce back to Earth.

The Apollo missions left six retroreflectors on the Moon. NASA says this new one “will greatly improve upon the Apollo results with sub-millimeter range measurements, providing advances in the lunar coordinate system in advance of the Artemis program.”

It will also be “support … long-term investigation of lunar physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology” and “contribute to bettering our understanding of the inner structure of the Moon and in addressing theories of dark matter.” ®