The private lunar vehicle Blue Ghost, which was owned by the American company Firefly Aerospace, landed on the Moon with special cargo for NASA. It has already transmitted the first images to Earth.
Blue Ghost descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, landing on the slopes of an ancient volcanic crater on the northeastern side of the Moon. Half an hour after landing, Blue Ghost began sending photos from the surface. The first is a selfie slightly obscured by the sun’s glare. The second picture shows the Earth as a blue dot shimmering in the blackness of space. He also took some not-so-clear pictures of the Moon.
Blue Ghost has a vacuum device to suck up lunar soil for analysis and a drill with a sensor to measure temperature at a depth of 3 meters below the lunar surface. Also on board is a device to eliminate abrasive lunar dust, a problem for the first NASA astronauts on the Apollo mission as it covered their spacesuits and equipment.
Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander delivered 10 instruments to the Moon for NASA. This is the third mission in NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, which aims to conduct research before astronauts travel to the Moon later this decade.
The vertical and stable landing makes Firefly, a startup founded a decade ago, the first private company to put a spacecraft on the Moon without an accident.
Blue Ghost, named after a rare American firefly species, is a squat, four-legged lander 2 meters high and 3.5 meters in diameter.