The privately-owned Blue Ghost moon lander, built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, has captured rare views of a lunar eclipse from the moon’s surface.
The lander, which touched down March 2 in a volcanic plain on the moon’s nearside, has spent its time deploying instruments and collecting data. On the night of March 13, as Earth’s shadow covered the moon in a total lunar eclipse, Blue Ghost turned its cameras back toward Earth.
Around 4:30 a.m. EDT, the lander captured the “diamond ring effect,” as a single point of sunlight emerged from behind our planet at the end of totality. Earth itself, appearing as a dark disk in the black lunar sky, is encircled by glowing ring of light.
The first image from the eclipse, captured about three hours earlier, was deceptive — the sun appeared to still be shining brightly. But a reflection in the lander’s solar panels revealed an otherwise hidden detail: an arc of light wreathing Earth with just a spot of sunlight sneaking through.
Since landing, the spacecraft has put eight of its 10 science instruments to work. These include a device that uses a blast of pressurized nitrogen gas to collect and sort lunar soil; a dust shield demonstration, using electrical forces to lift lunar dirt from glass surfaces, which could help keep future spacecraft clean of famously sticky moondust; another experiment to measure the stickiness of that dust; a drill to measure heat flow from the moon’s interior; and an experiment to test a form of lunar GPS.
Cameras on the lander’s underside also took a video of the lander’s engine plumes interacting with the lunar surface, which could provide insights for making future landings smoother and cleaner.
This is not the first time a spacecraft has observed an eclipse from the lunar vicinity. In 2009, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kaguya orbiter saw a penumbral eclipse, in which the Earth mostly blocked the sun. And NASA’s Surveyor 3 moon lander saw an eclipse way back in 1967.
Associate news editor Christopher Crockett contributed to this story.
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