The Blue Ghost spacecraft captured images of the surface of the Moon's south pole as it approached the Earth's satellite. This is reported by UNN with reference to the page of Firefly Aerospace in the social network X.
Details
Firefly Aerospace, the company that developed the lander, posted a photo of the lunar surface dotted with numerous craters on social media.
On February 13, Blue Ghost fired up its engines for four minutes and 15 seconds, putting itself into an elliptical orbit of the moon before a planned landing attempt on the satellite's surface. The spacecraft took several images, which the company combined into a 27-second slow-motion video.
It is noted that Blue Ghost was launched on a SpaceX rocket on January 15. The lander's mission is part of NASA's CLPS program, under which the vehicle conducts 10 scientific and technical experiments.
In particular, it will study lunar dust, the radiation environment on the Moon, and the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth's magnetosphere. After the landing, the spacecraft is also planned to measure the distance to our planet using a laser reflector.
Thanks to the results of the experiments, the US space agency wants to better understand the lunar environment before sending astronauts there.
Blue Ghost is expected to spend the next two weeks in lunar orbit. Afterwards, it will launch an additional engine to make an additional flyby of the Earth's satellite, and then on March 2, it will try to land on the nearer side of the Moon - in the Sea of Crises area, which lies near a small crater.
The success will be of historical significance, as only one private company, Intuitive Machines, has so far managed to make a soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon. Back then, the Odysseus spacecraft landed near the Moon's south pole, also as part of a mission supported by the CLPS program.
Recall
The BepiColombo mission has captured a series of new images of Mercury during its sixth flyby of the planet. The spacecraft, launched in 2018, is scheduled to land on Mercury in 2026 for a detailed study.