The first images of the US private ship on the moon

On March 2, Blue Ghost landed in Mare Crisium (crisis) after skillfully performing two operations to avoid danger, landing exactly within 100 m from the target location near the Monsreille volcanic structure. “This is an extremely difficult technical miracle: landing on anything on the Moon surface,” Joel Kearns, Deputy Administrator in charge of the expedition of the Board of Directors of NASA’s scientific task, said at a press conference after the landing.

Firefly Aerospace does not broadcast the video about the landing process from Blue Ghost to release the bandwidth, serve the remote measurement and a number of tools to operate during the landing process, including the important dangerous avoidance system to help the ship avoid at least two rocks that are likely to be dangerous on the moon surface, according to Ray AllensWorth, director of the company’s spacecraft program.

A few hours after the Blue Ghost landed, the ship manufacturing company, Firefly Aerospace, published the first images from the Moon surface that it took. The original image was released from Blue Ghost’s frequency band data. The image of the X band with higher resolution is expected to be obtained in the following hours, when the ship deploys the main antenna.

The second image that Blue Ghost shows the ship is parked on the moon surface and a pale blue spot – the Earth. If you look closer to the amphibious ships, viewers can see the reflection of the Earth with more distinctive details.

In the third photo published, viewers can clearly see the moon surface around the landing position.

Blue Ghost is entering the operation of the moon one day, equivalent to 14 days of the earth. “The next 14 days is really a challenge and we will try to provide all scientific data from all 10 ClPs. I believe that the group will complete this job,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said at the press conference.

Blue Ghost carries 10 NASA research loads, designed to learn about the Moon environment. This task is part of the CLPS program (commercial moon load) of NASA, an extension in the plan to bring people back to the moon with the Artemis program.

An important milestone will take place on March 14, when Blue Ghost takes high definition photos of the Earth’s scene obscuring the sun from the moon. Meanwhile, the Earth will witness the event like a total lunar eclipse, when the Moon turns a strange crimson. On March 16, the landing ship will record the sunset on the moon and study the suspended dust reaction to the sun’s operation, a phenomenon that was first observed in Apollo 17 in 1972.

Before landing, Blue Ghost flew 4.5 million km in 45 days, transmitted 27 GB of data and supported many scientific studies, including record signal marks from the global positioning satellite system (GNSS) and measuring radiation through the Van Allen belt.