The Blue Ghost lunar lander from Firefly continues to provide remarkable findings from the moon's surface.
Blue Ghost succeeded in its moon landing try On March 2, they landed close to Mons Latreille, an isolated lunar mountain within the expansive Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") located in the northeast part of the moon. the moon It soon focused on its scientific goals, which involved gathering data and capturing imagery from the moon’s close side. stunning image on the lunar sunrise.
Recent updates from Firefly Aerospace provide video footage capturing some of the action. Blue Ghost's payloads One of these experiments is LISTER, which stands for Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity. This project has been actively drilling into the moon’s surface throughout this last week.
A video from the pneumatic, gas-driven drill created by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics demonstrates it drilling into the lunar surface, causing minor explosive bursts that emit sparks, likely because of this interaction. electrically-charged lunar surface . LISTER, utilizing refined nitrogen, plans to achieve a depth of approximately 6-9 feet (2-3 meters). During this process, it will take temperature readings to investigate the flow of heat within the moon’s interior and observe thermal variations at different levels.
At the same time, the Blue Ghost lander released four tethers with electrodes along with an 8-foot (2.4-meter) tall mast as part of NASA’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) instrument designed to investigate the architecture and makeup of the Moon's mantle.
A different payload called Lunar PlanetVac effectively gathered, moved, and categorized lunar soil from the moon utilizing pressurized nitrogen gas. video demonstrating the instrument in use.
NASA has 10 cargoes on Blue Ghost As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, eight missions have already achieved their goals as of March 6, according to information from Firefly Aerospace. These include the SCALPSS experiment, designed to study how the lander’s engines affect lunar soil when BlueGhost lands on the Moon.
The advancement has been quite significant for Blue Ghost; however, the mission is nearing completion. On March 16, the sun is expected to set over Blue Ghost, leading to depletion of the solar-powered lander’s energy reserves, thus concluding its mission.
The lander is, however, getting ready to capture images of the sunset in order to gain insights into how lunar dust floats above the surface as the lunar day ends.
