Years ago, NASA bet that trading companies could receive scientific experiments for a month for a lower budget than the agency could.
Last year it was a bad bet. The first spacecraft finimated NASA completely caused the moon. The other landed, but fell.
This month, however, from beginning to end, a robotic landing man named Blue Ghost, built by Aerospace in Cedar Park in Texas.
On March 16, the mood was on Firefly mission operations outside Austin a mixture of happy and melancholic. There was no more about doing anything – except for watching the company’s spacecraft.
In a quarter of a million kilometers away, the sun has already encountered mares, a lunar lava plain, where Blue Ghost had scientific observations for two weeks.
In the solar spacecraft, the remaining hours were numbered and little.
“I think the mood is generally quite easy,” said Ray Allensworth, program director of the Firefly spacecraft. “I think people are just enthusiastic and they just gave away to see how well the mission was, and at that time just tinted to enjoy the last few hours with landing.”
Scientists with a load on other commercial monthly missions have invested years of effort and ended up with a small or nothing. NASA assigned Blue Ghost comes up with cornopia of new data to work with.
Robert Grimm, a scientist at the southwestern research institute in Boulder, Colo., Who led one of the scientific useful loads, recognized his happiness. “Better than being a crater,” he said.
One of the NASA experiment had collection data just like Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of space nozzles as they kicked lunar dust and carved a small crater.
“This gives us the ability to measure three -dimensional shapes with these cameras,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working on a project known as a stereo camera for a lunar cloud studio or scalp.
Engineers want to understand these dynamics to prevent potential disasters when a larger and heavier spacecraft such as astronauts Starship Starship SpaceX on the Moon. If NASA sets a lunar base, the spacecraft will return to this site more than once. Rocks flying up could go the engine that we descended into a spacecraft or damage to nearby structures.
In early views of photography, one of the surprises is that the exhaust cloud from the nozzles began to dig lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record a dust cloud from a much larger landing, Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Original, Rocket Company Jeff Bezos, plans at the end of this year.
NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust or regolite, but also about how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and rough as glass shards and represent a danger to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on a blue spirit called an electrodynamic dust shield used electric fields to clean the dust ties.
Two information about the collection of experiment, which should cast light on the interior of the moon.
Dr. Dr. Grimma was a lunar magnetatellorine podder, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.
For deployment, spring pickled launchers cast four probes of sizes in four different dercis. The cables associated with landing acted like excessive voltmeters. The second component, raised at the top of the mast by eight feet, measured magnetic fields.
Together, these values reveal naturally occurring changes in electrical and magnetic fields that say how easily electric curs flows deep below the ground and it builds something about what is down there. For example, the conductivity of colder rocks is lower.
Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, by rupture of nitrogen gas to dig dirt. Needle at the end of the device measured temperature and how easily the temperature flows through the material. Since the rock in the way dropped only about three feet, not 10 feet hoping.
In the videos: “You can see the rocks fly and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, Vice President for reconnaissance systems in Honeybee Robotics, who built exercise.
Yet three tracks were deep enough for scientific measurements, said Dr. Sound. Data from the drill and Magneteltelric Soundnder could give hints about how the moon and other rocky worlds format or why the near side of the Moon looks so different from the other side.
“It is really the basic question about the lunar geology we are trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm.
Honeybee, which is part of blue origin, also builds a second device called Planetvac to prove a simplified technology for collecting samples. This device used a compressed gas to mix Regolit into a small tornado and directed it to a container.
This technology will be used on a robotic Japanese space mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will bring samples back from Phobos, Moon Mars.
“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us the certainty that it should also work on Phobos,” Dr. Sound.
Brian Walsha’s experiment at Blue Ghost wasn’t looking at the Moon, but back on the ground.
“It’s a really good favorable point,” Dr. Walsh, professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.
Dr. Walsh is interested in magnetic bobble, which diverts solar windows around the ground. Its telescope noted X -rays emitted when the high -speed particles from the sun slammed into atoms in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. The boundary between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind is like two sumo wrestlers pushing against each other. A distance from a distance should help scientists tell whether this boundary will move slowly or sudden jump.
This is important because it affects how well the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional Gargantuan Belches of Charge, which planet during sunstorms.
“We are trying to figure out how this gate opens and the energy spills,” Dr. Walsh.
Blue Ghost has already left permanent printing.
Maria Banks said that when she left Mission Operations Center every night, she would look at the moon hanging in the sky.
“Which would just stop me every day in their footsteps,” Dr. Banks. “I don’t think I’ll see you again, because for the rest of my life there will be Firefly and our instruments.”