This weekend Firefly Aerospace made history with the first fully successful moon landing by a private company, and now you can watch the moment the Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon in stunning video footage.
The footage shows the lander’s final descent to the lunar surface, with views from both downward-facing and outward-facing cameras. As well as the craters covering the moon, you can also see the glare from the sun and the Earth visible in the sky.
The mission also captured this gorgeous image of sunrise on the moon, showing the sun peeking over the lunar horizon. A day on the moon lasts around fourteen Earth days, and during this time the Blue Ghost spacecraft will use solar energy collected by its solar panels for power. After two weeks of operations, on March 16, the mission will observe the lunar sunset and then operate for a final few hours into the lunar night before shutting down.
“Up next, Blue Ghost will continue NASA payload operations through March 16. Just in the last two days, our downlinked data increased from 27 GB to 57 GB, including critical science data,” Firefly announced in an update. “Surface operations performed so far include deploying Lunar PlanetVac and sampling lunar regolith, deploying the Electrodynamic Dust Shield and demonstrating dust mitigation, capturing images from SCALPSS, and continuing operations for the other payloads.”
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You can see the Lunar PlanetVac instrument deployed onto the surface in this image:
The instrument will test out a method of sample collection using pneumatics, which works by firing a blast of gas at the surface. This lifts up dust and small particles, which are then collected into a chamber for imaging and sieving. If it works, this system will be a cheaper and faster way to collect samples from the moon’s surface than using complex robotic arms for the job.