A commercial lander arrived just in time to watch the sun rise over the surface of the moon, capturing dramatic shadows cast among craters under a dazzling bloom of light.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost spacecraft touched down at 3:34 a.m. ET on March 2. Though Firefly wasn't the trailblazer — the first private robotic lander to make the journey to the surface occurred last year — it was the first to get its lander there upright and in one piece — a point the Texas-based company emphasized when it announced its mission success.
NASA and four other government space programs around the world have stuck a moon landing, but so far just one prior company, Intuitive Machines, hasn't crashed so badly that it couldn't operate. Its lander ended up on its side in February 2024, limiting what science it could collect and send back to Earth. Meanwhile, Intuitive Machines is sending its second lander, Athena, to the moon for an attempt to land again on Thursday, March 6.
"With the hardest part behind us, Firefly looks forward to completing more than 14 days of surface operations, again raising the bar for commercial cislunar capabilities," said Shea Ferring, Firefly's chief technology officer, in a statement. "Just through transit to the Moon, Firefly’s mission has already delivered the most science data to date for the NASA CLPS initiative."
Though the moon is only about 250,000 miles away, Blue Ghost, named after an exotic type of firefly, traveled more than 2.8 million miles over the course of 45 days in space, testing its systems and collecting copious amounts of spacecraft data, before attempting the landing.
Blue Ghost is now sitting on Mare Crisium, a plain made from an ancient hardened lava flow. It's next to a volcanic feature, Mons Latreille, in the northeast on the near side of the moon. The landing site is expected to provide insights into the lunar environment and test technologies for supporting future landings carrying astronauts.
Firefly's lander, originally scheduled to lift off in late 2024, is the first NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission of the year. The program has invested $2.6 billion in contracts with vendors from the private sector to help deliver instruments to the moon and send back crucial data. Blue Ghost is carrying 10 instruments for NASA, which has paid Firefly $101.5 million for the ride. The space agency wants to see a regular cadence of moon missions to prepare for astronaut-led Artemis expeditions in 2027 or later.
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The lander will conduct experiments over the next two weeks, the equivalent of a full lunar day. During that time, NASA will test underground drilling, lunar soil sample collection, and radiation-tolerant computing.
"The data captured could also benefit humans on Earth by providing insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces impact Earth," NASA said in a statement on Sunday.
There are sure to be many more rare and dramatic images beamed home. Toward the end of the mission, Blue Ghost will send back images of the lunar sunset, studying how moon dust levitates from solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow. Following sundown, Blue Ghost will operate for several more hours through the darkness of lunar night, continuing to take pictures, to see how the dust's behavior changes.
