Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander continues to deliver stunning results from the surface of the moon.
Blue Ghost aced its lunar landing attempt on March 2, touching down near Mons Latreille, a solitary lunar peak in the vast basin Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) in the northeastern region of the moon’s near side. The spacecraft quickly got to work on its science objectives, including taking a stunning image on the lunar sunrise.
New updates from Firefly Aerospace deliver video action of some of Blue Ghost’s payloads in action. One of these is the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) experiment which has been drilling into the lunar surface over the past week.
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Video of the pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics shows it boring into the moon, resulting in small explosive eruptions that throw off sparks, possibly due to the electrically-charged lunar surface. LISTER, which uses purified nitrogen, is aiming to reach a depth of around 6-9 feet (2-3 meters), taking temperature measurements as it goes to study how well heat flows through the moon’s interior, and the thermal changes between depths.
Meanwhile, the Blue Ghost lander also deployed four tethered electrodes and an 8-foot (2.4m) mast that make up NASA’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) payload to study the structure and composition of the moon’s mantle.
Another payload, Lunar PlanetVac, successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil from the moon using pressurized nitrogen gas with video showing the instrument in action.
NASA has 10 payloads on Blue Ghost as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and eight of these had already met their mission objectives as of March 6, according to Firefly. This includes SCALPSS, which observed the effects of the lander’s engine plumes on lunar regolith when Blue Ghost touched down on the moon.
Progress has been very good for Blue Ghost, but the mission is approaching its end. The sun is due to set on Blue Ghost on March 16, after which the solar powered lander will run out of energy and come to the end of its mission.
The lander is however preparing to image the sunset to learn how lunar dust levitates above the surface at the close of the lunar day.