The Blue Ghost lander of the Texas-based Firefly Aerospace sent a video of a soft landing on the Moon on March 2.
The Blue Ghost became the second private spacecraft in history to make a successful landing on the surface of the Earth’s satellite. The video shows the cratered surface of the Moon in the «Sea of Crises» region and dust clouds raised from the Moon’s surface by engines Blue Ghost.
«Watch Firefly land on the moon! After detecting surface hazards and choosing a safe landing site, Blue Ghost landed next to a key location in the Sea of Crises. A historic moment on March 2 that we will never forget. “We have moon dust on our boots!”» — said Firefly Aerospace.
What Blue Ghost will do on the lunar surface
The car-sized spacecraft was launched on January 15, 2025, and was launched into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, Blue Ghost is to install research equipment on the Moon and collect as much information as possible to be used in the space program Artemis (the ultimate goal of the NASA program is to return astronauts to the Moon).
The Blue Ghost is expected to operate on the Moon for two weeks, and then its solar panels will shut down after the Sun sets over the «Sea of Crises».
According to NASA, Blue Ghost has already demonstrated the ability to use GPS signals on the Moon. It is worth noting that accurate and reliable navigation will be extremely important as part of Artemis’ mission.
However, traditional GPS tools are not very effective when you are 3 million 621 thousand kilometers from the Earth, so NASA and Italian Space Agency engineers proposed to use the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver LuGRE. On January 21, LuGRE surpassed NASA’s previous record for the highest GNSS signal reception altitude at 3 million 378 thousand km during the Blue Ghost flight to the Moon, and then set a new record at a distance of 3 million 910 thousand km from Earth.
Currently, NASA uses onboard sensors and ground signals to track spacecraft. However, these methods require a team of engineers. Replacing some of these systems with GNSS can reduce the need for operators, as spacecraft are able to pick up these signals autonomously.
«On Earth, we can use GNSS signals to navigate everything from smartphones to airplanes LuGRE has now demonstrated to us that we can successfully receive and track GNSS signals on the Moon», — explains Deputy Assistant Administrator of the NASA SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program Kevin Coggins.
The Firefly Aerospace lander is not the only spacecraft to land on the Moon as part of a number of private NASA projects. On Thursday, March 6, the module Athena Intuitive Machines, which has managed to complete the first-ever The arrival of a private spacecraft on the Moon. Simultaneously with Blue Ghost, a Japanese module was sent to the Moon along a long trajectory Resilience Tokyo-based ispace, which announced that it plans to land on the moon on June 5.
Source: Space.com
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