Firefly Aerospace’s blue ghost land descended from the lunar orbit on the autopilot, pointing to the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the northeast edge of the moon on the nearby side.
The successful touchdown confirmation came from the control of the company’s mission outside Austin, Texas, after the action of about 360,000 kilometers away.
“All of you caught the landing. We are on the moon,” said Firefly’s Will Coogan, landing chief engineer.
A vertical 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. Even countries have hesitated, with only five claiming success: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan.
Half an hour after landing, Blue Ghost began sending photos from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the glow of the sun. The second shot included the native planet, a blue point that shines in the blackness of space.
Two other landing companies are hot with the heels of Blue Ghost, and it is expected that the next one will join him at the moon at the end of this week.
The blue ghost, named for a rare species of fireflies, had its size and shape for it. The four -legged landing on squatting measures 2 meters high and 3.5 meters wide, providing additional stability, according to the company.
Throwed in mid -January from Florida, the Lander brought 10 experiments to the Moon for NASA. The space agency paid $ 101 million ($ 162 million) for delivery, plus US44 million ($ 70 million) for science and technology on board. It is the third mission under the NASA commercial delivery program, aimed at lighting a lunar economy of competing private companies while exploring before astronauts appear later this decade.
Ray Allensworth of Firefly said the landing jumped the dangers, including the rocks to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to discover the exact position of the landing, but all the indications suggest that it landed within the target area of 100 meters in Mare Crisium.
The demonstrations must have two weeks of execution time, before the lunar day and the landing is ended.
He carried a vacuum to absorb the dirt of the moon for the analysis and a drill to measure the temperature as deep as 3 meters below the surface. Also on board: a device to eliminate abrasive lunar dust: a scourge for NASA’s long loups, the walkers of the moon, who covered it in all their spaces of spaces and equipment.
On his way to the moon, Blue Ghost returned the exquisite images of the native planet. The landing module continued stunned once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the gray moon surface. At the same time, an on -board receptor tracked and acquired signs of the constellations of GPS and Europe Galileo of the United States, an encouraging step in navigation for future explorers.
The landing prepared the stage for a new crush of visitors weighing for a lunar business.
Another landing module, a high and skinny 4 meters high, built and operated by Houston -based intuitive machines, is due to land on the moon on Thursday. He is pointing at the bottom of the moon, just 160 kilometers from the South Pole. That is closer to what the company obtained last year with its first landing, which broke a leg and leaned.
Despite the fall, the landing of intuitive machines returned to the United States to the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed the Apollo program in 1972.
A third landing of the Japanese company Ispace is still three months after landing. He shared a rocket walk with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on January 15, taking a longer and more voracious route. Like intuitive machines, Ispace is also trying to land on the moon for the second time. His first landing crashed in 2023.
The moon is full of remains not only of the ISPACE, but also dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.
NASA wants to maintain a rhythm of two private lunar lunar a year, realizing that some missions will fail, said the main science officer of the Space Agency, Nicky Fox.
“It really opens a completely new way so that we get more science to space and the moon,” Fox said.
Unlike NASA’s Apollo Moon Apollo Lands that had billions of dollars behind them and astronauts to the helm, private companies operate with a limited budget with robotic crafts that must land on their own, said the Firefly CEO, Jason Kim.
Kim said everything was like a clock.
“We have some moon dust in our boots,” Kim said.
