Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is sharing some amazing views from just above the moon.
Blue Ghost beamed home gorgeous, up-close shots of the moon’s far side on Feb. 24, just after lowering its orbit ahead of a Sunday morning (March 2) landing attempt.
“That feeling you get when you look out the window and realize you’re almost home!” Texas-based Firefly wrote in a Feb. 26 X post, which shared a 93-second video of the Blue Ghost footage.
The video, “sped up by 10X, was taken about 100 km above the lunar surface, showing the far side of the moon and a top-down view of Blue Ghost’s RCS [reaction control system] thrusters (center) and radiator panels on each side. The radiator panels are moving nominally to protect Blue Ghost’s subsystems from extreme temperatures,” Firefly representatives added in a Feb. 26 blog post.
Blue Ghost launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15 and entered lunar orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft — Firefly’s first-ever lunar lander — will touch down on Sunday at 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 GMT) in the Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region of the moon’s near side, if all goes according to plan.
Blue Ghost’s mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science gear on private robotic moon landers.
Blue Ghost is carrying 10 NASA payloads, which will study the other lunar radiation environment, the lunar regolith and the solar wind, among other tasks. The lander’s surface mission will last about 14 Earth days.
Related: Welcome to the moon! Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander reaches lunar orbit (video, photos)
Just one private spacecraft has successfully soft-landed on the moon to date — Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus vehicle, which pulled off the feat last February.
Blue Ghost aims to be the second, and several others are on its heels. For example, Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander launched Wednesday evening (Feb. 26) and is scheduled to touch down on March 6.
Then there’s Resilience, a lander built by Tokyo-based company ispace. Resilience launched on the same Falcon 9 as Blue Ghost but is taking a more circuitous path to the moon; its landing attempt is tentatively scheduled for late May or early June.