A robotic spaceship from an American startup near the moon early on Sunday morning.
Built by Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas, the Blue Ghost Lander landed at 3:34am east time.
“You guys have all stopped landing,” Blue Ghost Chief Engineer Wilkougan said during a live stream in the flight operations room. “We're on the moon.”
It was an amazing success for the company and achieved something many others don't have.
“I had moon dust on my boots,” Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly, said minutes later.
Only countries, businesses and organizations that have attempted to gently halt the moon in the 21st century, can claim full success in their first attempt. Others, including nonprofits in India, Russia, Israeli, and Japanese companies, all crashed and carved new craters on the surface of the moon.
Two Landers, sent last year by the Japanese space agency Jakusa, the other, was sent by an intuitive Houston machine, but landed and continued working and communicating with the Earth. But both fell, limiting what the spacecraft could accomplish on the surface of the moon.
The intuitive machinery was the first private company to land on the moon. Fireflies are second.
“We're lucky not to go first,” Ray Allensworth, head of Firefly's Blue Ghost program, said in an interview last week. “We use a lot of the publicly available data from other US and other international companies that have already been on the moon.”
This allowed Fireflies to train their navigation software and perhaps avoid the pitfalls of previous attempts.
Where was the Blue Ghost Land?
The mission was located in Male Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava filled and hardened within a 345-mile crater carved by the impact of an ancient asteroid. The mare chrysium is located in the northeast quadrant near the moon.
What did Blue Ghost take for the month?
Lander carries a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the moon, including NASA's 10. These include drills to measure the flow of heat from the interior of the moon to the surface, electrodynamic dust shields to clean the surfaces of glass and radiators, and x-ray cameras.
That cargo is part of the Commercial Moon Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to place NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA had built its own lunar landing aircraft. The agency will pay Firefly to $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the moon. It's a little less if the mission isn't fully successful.
Why did the landing happen so early?
Physics that reach a specific location in the solar system at a certain time may not always match when people are awake and watching. As the Blue Ghost Lander spacecraft gains its power from solar panels, the mission aims to land just after the dawn of a new moon day. And to reach the mare chrysium on March 2nd, the landing time will be 3:45am in the eastern part.
“That's just when it happened,” said Ray Allensworth, program manager at Blue Ghost at Firefly.
The mission is to continue Earth Day for approximately 14 days until the moon's sunset.
How has your mission's journey to the moon gone?
Blue Ghost played almost perfectly. For the first 25 days, the company turned on and checked the spacecraft's system and surrounded the Earth. It then fired the engine on a four-day journey to the moon and entered orbit on February 13th. The spacecraft camera recorded a close-up view of the lunar crater surface.
Along the way, a few small glitches appeared, but there were no major malfunctions. In most cases, mission controllers learned and adjusted how spacecraft behave in space environments.
“The thermal alarm can go off,” Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned and a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You look at that data and are you actually okay?”
What happened to the other Lunar Landers released on Blue Ghost?
The same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket fired the Blue Ghost to Orbit at Resilience, a lunar landing erected by the Japanese ispace. The two missions are separate, but ISPACE wanted a ride share from SpaceX in search of a cheaper ride into the space. In other words, I hitched the ride as a secondary payload. It turns out to be a Blue Ghost launch.
Resilience began at the same time as the Blue Ghost, but requires a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon, and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.
