When the Earth passed by the Sun earlier today, the Blue Ghost lunar lander had a beautiful view from the moon's surface. Image above, video below. Built by Firefly Aerospace, Blue Ghost touched down on the Moon last week, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to stick its landing. (Sorry, Intuitive Machines.) Watch the probe's magnificent landing here. Blue Ghost's primary mission was to drop off 10 NASA scientific instruments to the lunar surface.
From Firefly Aerospace:
Captured at our landing site in the Moon's Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth. This marks the first time in history a commercial company was actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously as the lunar eclipse we witnessed on Earth[…]
Mission control engineers will now need to wait a little while longer before downlinking more images in order to give the X-band antenna time to warm up after experiencing the extremely cold temperatures resulting from about two hours' worth of totality[…]
Although Blue Ghost is scheduled to permanently power down a few hours after night descends on the moon on March 16, it still has at least one more photoshoot scheduled. Engineers plan to downlink images from the upcoming lunar sunset in another first for the historic lander.
