“A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon” this month, “the latest in a string of companies” to visit Earth’s nearest neighbor, reported the Associated Press:
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome…Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles away….An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.
A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun’s glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space….
Blue Ghost had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 tall and 11 feet wide, providing extra stability.
Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery…the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely within the 328-foot target zone in Mare Crisium….The experiments will end in two weeks, when lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet below the surface…
On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface.
A NASA spacecraft recently made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
And a British spacecraft captured up-close images of Mercury.
Last year, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
