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.
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“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.