The hits from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission to the moon keep coming, as just days after sharing gorgeous images of Earth seen from space, the spacecraft has now captured incredible footage of the moon seen from orbit.
Launched last month, the spacecraft will attempt the second ever soft landing on the moon by a commercial entity. Having spend several weeks in orbit around Earth before heading toward the moon, the spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit yesterday, February 13.
“The Firefly team nailed our most challenging burn to date!” Firefly wrote in an update. “Starting at 7:51 p.m. CST on February 13, the team completed a 4 minute, 15 second Lunar Orbit Insertion burn with Blue Ghost’s RCS thrusters and main engine to enter an elliptical orbit around the Moon. Over the next 16 days, we’ll conduct additional maneuvers to circularize our orbit and get closer to the lunar surface.”
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As the spacecraft approached the moon, it took this stunning image showing the sun, the moon, and the spacecraft’s solar panels in the foreground. You can also see some of the NASA science instruments that the spacecraft is carrying, like the LEXI payload (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, a tool for researching space weather) and a communications antenna.
In addition, a set of images that were captured during the spacecraft’s lunar orbit insertion burn have been stitched together to create this striking timelapse of the view of the moon as the spacecraft swings around it:
The spacecraft is now in a wide elliptical orbit around the moon, meaning it is traveling in an oval pattern. Over the next two weeks, the spacecraft will fire its engines to adjust its orbit to become more circular and it will gradually come closer to the moon until it comes in to attempt a landing on March 2.
Landing on the moon remains tricky due to its uneven surface, with many boulders and craters. A previous company that was the first private entity to achieve a soft landing on the moon, Intuitive Machines, had problems when its lander came down at an angle which limited its ability to collect power using its solar panels.
Firefly is hoping to avoid this problem by using terrain relative navigation, a system in which images of the moon’s surface are processed by an on-board computer to select a safe landing spot, but we’ll have to wait until next month to see if they are successful.