Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander made the most of its last few hours of life on the moon.
The solar-powered Blue Ghost shut down on Sunday evening (March 16), shortly after the sun set over its lunar locale. The lander watched our star’s descent and disappearance over the cratered horizon, capturing the oncoming, killing darkness in a poignant video that Firefly shared with the world today (March 18).
“These are the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon [on the moon],” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference today.
While the photos are beautiful, they’re also of scientific interest, Kearns added, citing their potential to inform models of light scattering and illumination on the lunar surface.
“There’s going to be a bunch of physics analysis and optics analysis that’ll be done on that,” he said.
Related: Farewell, Blue Ghost! Private moon lander goes dark to end record-breaking commercial lunar mission
Blue Ghost launched Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Firefly’s first-ever moon mission, a flight sponsored by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. On March 2, the lander set down softly in the Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region of the moon’s near side, becoming just the second private vehicle ever to ace a lunar touchdown.
Blue Ghost and its 10 NASA science instruments operated as planned for the next two weeks, gathering a variety of data about the lunar environment.
The agency’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload, for example, drilled into the near subsurface to measure temperature and heat flow. Another instrument, called Lunar PlanetVac, collected and sorted regolith (dirt and gravel), demonstrating techniques that could be used on sample-return missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.
And Blue Ghost snapped a range of breathtaking imagery, from up-close views of its own landing to a “diamond ring” solar eclipse to the newly released sunset shots.
“At NASA Science, we’re incredibly pleased with Blue Ghost Mission 1, both in the outcome of the mission and also how well the Firefly and the NASA payload teams worked together to achieve something new,” Kearns said.
Blue Ghost was always expected to meet its end on Sunday; the lander was not designed to survive the extreme cold of lunar night, which lasts for about two Earth weeks.
So Blue Ghost’s silence is likely permanent, though Firefly will try hailing the lander again after the sun rises over Mare Crisium, company representatives said.
“This lander has surprised me multiple times over the last two months, and things have gone extremely well,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director, said during today’s news conference. “So, I’ll remain optimistic. Maybe we will get a signal in early April, and we’ll certainly let you all know if we do.”
