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INCREDIBLE IMAGES OF THE SUCCESSFUL MOON LANDING BY BLUE GHOST LANDER

Published: 2025-03-09 15:42:00 Last Updated: 2025-03-10 12:29:11

Lunar history has been made. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which carried crucial NASA payloads, landed on the Moon after a 45-day transit and a total distance of over 2.8 million miles. After multiple unsuccessful attempts by other private companies, Firefly has now become the first commercial company to accomplish a fully successful lunar landing.
Blue Ghost touched down on the Moon on Sunday, March 2, at 3:34 a.m. EST, after being launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in mid-January. The four-legged artifact landed within its 328-foot target zone in an old volcanic dome in the Mare Crisium region, which is in the northeast quadrant of the Moon's near side, according to Firefly. Blue Ghost's dimensions—6.6 feet tall by 11 feet wide—provided additional stability and helped guarantee a smooth landing.
During its journey to the Moon and landing, Blue Ghost captured some amazing photos of our satellite and Earth, along with some ingenious "selfies." A self-portrait with Earth in the background, a picture of a lunar sunrise, a picture of the Moon's south pole covered in craters, and a picture of Blue Ghost's shadow reflecting on the Moon's surface with Earth in the background are some of the most striking pictures.

Blue Ghost is equipped with ten NASA science and technology tools, including the Lunar PlanetVac (LPV), a vacuum that can gather and separate moon dust for additional examination; the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER), a drill technology that can measure temperature and conductivity up to three meters below the surface; the Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC), a tool that examines how moon dust sticks to various materials—essential for future spacesuits and bases; and a Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR), which helps calculate the distance between Earth and the Moon by reflecting very brief laser pulses.

In addition to working for a few hours into the lunar night, this technology will run for one lunar day, or fourteen Earth days. Since Blue Ghost and the Artemis campaign are closely linked, their information is essential to both understanding what happens down here and bringing humans back to the moon. NASA claims that the information gathered will help humanity by shedding light on how space weather and other cosmic forces affect Earth.

Blue Ghost's mission also represents a turning point in private lunar delivery as part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, which is anticipated to spur competition among companies vying for NASA contracts in the years to come. This is especially intriguing because, unlike NASA's historic missions, which received billions of dollars in funding, private companies operate on a shoestring budget with devices that must land independently—something Firefly just demonstrated was possible.

Article Tags: Viral Space NASA Moon landing Blue Ghost Lander