NASA bets a few years ago that commercial companies could visit scientific experiments on the moon on a lower budget than institutions.
Last year, it was a bad bet. The first NASA fed the spacecraft completely missed the moon. The second landed, but fell.
But this month, the robot lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas, was a success from start to finish.
On March 16th, the mood at Firefly's mission operation on the outskirts of Austin was a happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing to do – except to watch the company's spaceship die.
The sun, 15 million miles away, had already set in the mare's chrysium, the lava plain of the moon, where Blue Ghosts had been collecting scientific observations for two weeks.
For solar-powered spacecraft, the remaining time was numbers, and a few.
“I think the mood is generally pretty light,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the spaceship program at Firefly, that afternoon. “I think people are just excited and I think they're taking a little time to see how well the mission has gone and enjoy the last few hours at Lander.”
Scientists who have cargo on other commercial moon missions have invested years of effort and have done little or no. NASA, assigned to Blue Ghost, has a treasure trove of new data to collaborate with.
Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Institute in Boulder, Colorado, led one of the scientific payloads and recognized his fortune. “It's better than being a crater,” he said.
One of the NASA experiments collected data as if the blue ghost had landed. The four cameras captured the scenery from various angles of the spacecraft's thruster exhaust, kicking the moon's dust and carving small craters.
“This gives these cameras the ability to measure three-dimensional shapes,” says Paul Dany, one of the scientists working on a project known as the Lune's feather study or scalp stereo camera.
Engineers want to understand the dynamics that will prevent potential disasters for larger and heavier spacecrafts, such as SpaceX's Starship Land Astronauts on the Moen. If NASA sets up a front post base for the moon, the spacecraft will return to that site multiple times. Rocks flying upwards can knock out engines on a descending spacecraft or damage nearby structures.
In an early view of the photo, one surprise is that the exhaust plume from the thruster began kicking the moon's dust when the blue ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record dust clouds from a much larger lander. Blue Moonmark 1 is scheduled to be sent to the moon later this year by Jeff Bezos Rocket Company, a Blue Origin.
NASA not only wants to understand the dust and regolith of the moon, but also wants a way to get rid of it. The particles are sharp and abrasive like shards of glass, pose a danger to machines and astronauts. In an experiment with blue ghosts called electrodynamic dust shields, an electric field was used to clean dust from the surface.
Two experiments gathered information that should be shining light inside the moon.
Dr. Grimm's payload was the sound of the moon's magnetic extensors, where the first of this kind was unfolded on the surface of another world.
To unfold, the spring road launcher threw four probes for the size of the soup can in four different directions. The probe connected to the lander with a cable worked like an ultra-altitude voltmeter. A magnetic field measured by a second component raised above an 8-foot-high mast.
Together, these measurements reveal the naturally occurring variations in electric and magnetic fields that allow electrical fields to flow deep underground and communicate something about what is there. For example, cold rocks have low conductivity.
Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill that uses bursts of nitrogen gas to drill dirt. A needle at the edge of the instrument measured temperature and how the material could be easily flowed. Due to rocks along the way, the drill only dropped about 3 feet. It wasn't the 10 feet we had expected.
In the video, “You can see rocks popping out and sparking,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, who built the drill.
Still, three feet were deep enough for scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Data from drills and magnetotelluric sounders can give hints on how the moon and other rocky worlds were formed, or why the sides near the moon are different from the width.
“This is a basic question about the geology of the moon that we are trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.
Honeybee, part of Blue Origin, has also built a second device called PlanetVac, which demonstrates a simplified technique for collecting samples. The device used compressed gas to stir the regolith into a small tornado and direct it into the container.
The technology will be used in a robot's Japanese space mission known as the Martian Moons Exploration, which retrieves samples from the Martian moon, Phobos.
“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should work for Fobo too,” Dr. Zaceney said.
Brian Walsh's experiment with blue ghosts did not see the moon, but returned to Earth.
“That's a really good perspective,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.
Dr. Walsh is interested in magnetic bubbles that deflect solar wind particles around the Earth. His telescope recorded the x-rays emitted when high-speed particles from the sun were slumped into atoms in the upper atmosphere of Earth. The boundary between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind is like two SUMO wrestlers oppose each other. Views from afar should help scientists communicate whether their boundaries change slowly or shift with a sudden leap.
It's important because it affects how well the Earth's magnetic field protects us from the occasional huge belch of charged particles that fire planets during solar storms.
“We're trying to figure out how that gate is open and how energy is flowing out,” Dr. Walsh said.
Blue Ghost already leaves a lasting impression.
Maria Banks said she leaves the mission operations center every night and looks up at the moon hanging in the sky.
“It's basically going to stop me with my truck every day,” Dr. Banks said. “For the rest of my life, the Firefly lander and our instruments are there so I don't think I'll see the moon the same way again.”
