Mission of the Blue Ghost lunar lander ends after two weeks
After two weeks, the Blue Ghost lander from the US company Firefly Aerospace is silent. It was the longest private moon mission to date.
Blue Ghost on the moon
(Image: Firefly Aerospace)
Blue Ghost is no longer communicating. Firefly Aerospace has abandoned its lunar lander. The US space company considers the mission a success.
On Sunday evening (Texas local time), five hours after nightfall on the moon, Firefly received the last data transmission from Blue Ghost. Blue Ghost sent a total of 119 gigabytes of data to Earth during the entire mission.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externes YouTube-Video (Google Ireland Limited) geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (Google Ireland Limited) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
Ghost Riders in the Sky is the longest private lunar mission to date, the company announced. Blue Ghost was also the first private lander to make a completely successful landing on the moon. During the first successful private landing in 2024, the lander tipped over.
Blue Ghost launched in January
The Blue Ghost lander set off for the moon in mid-January on board a Falcon 9 rocket. The Japanese lander Hakuto-R Mission 2 was also on board, but is not due to arrive on the moon until May or June.
One month after the launch, Blue Ghost reached lunar orbit. The lander touched down on March 2. The following day, it sent a picture of the sunrise over the Mare Crisium (Sea of Decisions).
“There is no such thing as an easy moon landing, especially on the first attempt,” said Will Coogan, chief engineer of the mission. In preparation, the team therefore tested every system on the landing vehicle over and over again and simulated pretty much every scenario they could imagine in advance.
The mission lasted one lunar day
The mission lasted one lunar day – which corresponds to two weeks on Earth. During this time, Blue Ghost took high-resolution images of a total solar eclipse and carried out a series of scientific experiments. The lander had ten instruments on board.
Videos by heise
These included the Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR), which helped to measure the moon and its distance from Earth by reflecting laser pulses from the Earth. The Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) recorded the electrical conductivity and magnetic fields to draw conclusions about the structure and composition of the lunar mantle. The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), part of a cooperation between the US space agency NASA and the Italian space agency ASI, received signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), GPS and Galileo, to test whether these can also be used on the moon in the future.
(wpl)
