The privately-owned Blue Ghost moon lander, built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, has captured a rare view of a lunar eclipse from the moon’s surface.
The lander, which touched down March 2 in a volcanic plain on the moon’s nearside, has spent its time deploying instruments and collecting data. On the night of March 13, as Earth’s shadow covered the moon in a total lunar eclipse, Blue Ghost turned its cameras back toward Earth.
The first image from the eclipse, captured around 1:30 a.m. EDT, is deceptive — the sun appears to shine brightly in the inky black lunar sky. But a reflection in the lander’s solar panels reveals an otherwise hidden detail: a glowing ring encircling our planet, with just a spot of sunlight sneaking through. As the spacecraft warms up from its stint in total darkness, Firefly expects to download more images from the eclipse.
Since landing, the spacecraft has put eight of its 10 science instruments to work. These include a device that uses a blast of pressurized nitrogen gas to collect and sort lunar soil; a dust shield demonstration, using electrical forces to lift lunar dirt from glass surfaces, which could help keep future spacecraft clean of famously sticky moondust; another experiment to measure the stickiness of that dust; a drill to measure heat flow from the moon’s interior; and an experiment to test a form of lunar GPS.
Cameras on the lander’s underside also took a video of the lander’s engine plumes interacting with the lunar surface, which could provide insights for making future landings smoother and cleaner.
This is not the first time a spacecraft has observed an eclipse from the lunar vicinity. In 2009, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kaguya orbiter saw a penumbral eclipse, in which the Earth mostly blocked the sun. And NASA’s Surveyor 3 moon lander saw an eclipse way back in 1967.
Associate news editor Christopher Crockett contributed to this story.