Den Lunar Lander’s Rune: Eclipse Photos and Rock Collecting

Blue Ghost has just finished his mission, which scared the whole lunar day – two weeks of the country – on the near side of the moon.

A small car spacecraft has made a number of experiences. He drove three tracks into the lunar soil, acquiring X -ray images of the magnetic bubble that surrounds and protects the earth and was looking for a mysterious yellow glow at sunset.

Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace, a startup in Texas, was released from the ground in January and in mid -February withdrew into orbit. A few weeks later it took this video, accelerating by factor 10 because it orbited 62 miles with a surface. The shiny leaves are radiator panels that protected the spacecraft from extreme heat in the sun.

Landing

In the early morning hours of March 2. Blue ghost engine fired the engine to release it from orbit and fall for a month. Only an hour later it was on the surface in the cisium Crisium, the lava plain inside the ancient 345 million-based impact crater in the northeastern quadrant of the nearest moon.

Blue Ghost became the first successful landing of the commercial company and Firefly achieved it on the first attempt.

Several companies and countries have liked to land on the moon in recent years. The map below shows the Creed Apollo Monthly landing points as well as newer robotic landing China,, India,, Japan and Commercial. Recent Crash It also appears from unsuccessful landings.

Drag the Moon in any direction and see the landing places.

China has a success rate of 100 with successful robotic landings in the oven, but many other missions collapsed.

Disorders include Mission 1 Hakuto-R from ISPACE, Japanese Society; BERESHET, from Israeli non -profit organization; Luna 25, from Russia; and chandrayaan-2 from India. (Indian second attempt, chandrayaan-3, was successful.)

Three other Landers – Slim, from the Japanese Space Agency and Odysseus and Athena, from intuitive machines in Houston – landed and communicated back on the ground, but their success came with an asterisk. All three were overthrown after landing.

Experience

While Firefly was building and operating Blue Ghost, NASA sponsored the mission, part of the agency’s efforts to use commercial enterprises and sending scientific expenses to space at lower costs. NASA paid Firefly $ 101.5 million for transporting 10 scientific and technological pay -with loads on a lunar surface.

Blue Ghost landed at the Lunar sunrise, so the solar spacecraft could work the longest.

Lunar Sunrise in Crisium Mare.

Aerospace Firefly

One of the useful loads of Blue Ghost, Planetvac, has shown technology to simplify soil and rocks. He burned the gas explosion into the group that powered the material into the container. This technology will be used on the Japanese mission, Martian Moons Exploration, which will collect samples from Phobos, Moon Mars, and bring them back to Earth to study.

Another experiment, Lunar Magteltelleric Soundnder, threw four sensors, each slightly smaller than the soup, in directions at 90 degrees of angles to OneTher (like north, south, east and west to compass). The sensors landed about 60 feet away and the landing cables, the measured voltage – were connected – essentially an excessive version of the congress voltmeter. Eight feet high mast fired up and lifted the magnetic field measurement tool. The experiment gathered data on naturally occurring currents within the moon, which provides hints about the moon, is produced up to 700 miles below the surface.

Pneumatic drillle used nitrogen gas rupture to blow out and rocks and reached three feet below the surface. The probe measured the temperatures and heat flow from the interior of the moon.

Sunshine

While people on Earth accepted the blood month and the overall eclipse of the month of March, Blue Ghost witnessed and photographer a completely solar eclipse.

Blue Ghost reddish when the sun slipped behind the ground.

Aerospace Firefly

During the eclipse, temperatures dropped from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 270 degrees. The spacecraft developed on the energy of the battery to continue operation after five hours of almost overall darkness.

This picture shows the “effect of the diamond ring” when the sun began to emerge from behind the ground.

The effect of a diamond ring.

Aerospace Firefly

Sunset

On March 16, the sun began to set and the lunar day was almost over. Before his mission ended, Blue Ghost took a picture with a high resolution of the scene. It has been more than the last few nice pictures. Scientists hope that pictures can help solve the permanent scientific secrets of the glow Lunar Horizon.

Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, who was the last man in 1972 to walk after a month, outlined the observation of the glow of the allocation of the horizon before the sunrise. However, this phenomenon is not easy to explain because the moon lacks the atmosphere for distraction of light.

Sunset on March 16, with Earth and Venus just above the horizon.

Aerospace Firefly

Sign

This was the latest news from the Blue Ghost spacecraft, about five hours after sunset:

The spacecraft was not designed to survive the bitter cold of the lunar night. But another lunar mission, a Japanese slim spacecraft, surprised the engineers last year by driving on several lunar nights. In early April, after the sun rises again, Firefly will listen to radio messages from Blue Ghost, just in case it revived.